A service level management program ensures that all IT services offered to customers meet agreed upon standards of quality. It involves ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are in place, that they are adhered to and service levels are measured and reported on.
It is vital to have the correct tools in place to achieve all of this. The systems and processes that determine service levels are outsourced to third-party companies. It is therefore crucial to know how best to manage them within the context of your own SLM processes.
The first step to set up an SLM procedure is to identify what services are important to the business, and establishing reasonable metrics for success. This includes factors like efficiency, user base and design factors. It is important to carefully choose the technology expertise that a company that is specialized in a specific platform may be able to guarantee more efficient levels than a generalised service provider.
Once the SLA goals have been established and the teams have to create a plan to uphold them. This usually means putting in place systems that monitor progress, and notify the team of issues with achieving goals.
In addition, a robust SLM process will include continuous improvement processes. These will help teams to analyze the data they track, and discover ways to improve the processes that are causing them problems. For instance, if an NOC service is regularly missing the complete package for business software its SLA for answering telephone calls within 30 seconds it should be possible to determine why this is happening, and then fix it.