A process to manage service levels ensures that all IT services delivered to customers meet agreed-upon levels of quality. It includes making sure that Service Level Agreements are in place and are being fulfilled, assessing and reporting on service levels, and continuously working to increase the quality of service over time.
To accomplish all of this, it is essential to have the right tools in place. Most often the systems and processes used to define the service levels are subcontracted out to third parties. It is therefore crucial to know how you can best manage them within the context of your own SLM processes.
The first step in setting up a SLM process is to determine the services that are essential to the company and establishing a reasonable set of metrics for success. This usually involves taking into consideration factors like efficiency of the user base, as well as design aspects. It is also essential to select the right expertise in technology – for example an organization that specializes in a particular platform might be able to promise higher levels of performance than a generalized service provider.
After the SLA targets are set then teams need to devise an action plan to http://www.slm-info.org/2020/04/17/service-level-management-slm-benefits ensure they are met. This usually means creating systems that can track progress, and notify the team of issues in achieving goals.
A well-designed SLM procedure also includes continual improvement processes. These will enable teams to gain insight from the metrics they track, and discover ways to improve the processes that cause them problems. For instance, if an NOC service is regularly missing its SLA for answering telephone calls within 30 seconds it should be able to pinpoint the reason for why this is happening, and fix it.