SLAs for telephony

[TBlank]

Hi, I am new to ITIL and new to this forum. I have read 3 of ITIL's books - Serv Delivery, Serv Support and Planning to Implement.

I have been asked to draw up an SLA for an enterprise for which I am consulting, that covers its phone service. While not strictly an IT function, does anyone have experience composing an SLA for this type of service?

2nd question: we are having a hard time figuring our the right level at which to write an SLA - the overall service category which is composed of 6 billable services or the billable services themselves. I am leaning toward a 'master SLA' covering the 6 services because we can have SLA proliferation and hundreds will spring into existence, depending on the granularity at which we settle. Any insight would be helpful.

[javierarcal]

Hi,

To define an SLA for a telephone service you need to have first of all defined desired your Service level requirement and to define your SLR you need to define some kind of metrics for this service.

What sort of metrics are you thinking about?

I really think that for a telephone service the most important thing is availability to work out the number of lines required in a trunk group you can use Erlang calculator (erlang.com).


Hope it helps

Javier
Madrid-Spain
(javierrmadrid@hotmail.com)

[Wallop]

Can you provide some extra information....Are you drafting an SLA for internal enterprise use or an SLA to deal with an external vendor?

If it is for internal use, you can measure everything from charge back accuracy to the actual instalation (or change) of desktop phones, cell phones, pagers, etc. Just be creative but first you should certainly ask the end user what they like and what they don't like about the current system.

If you are trying to set up an SLA with an external telephony provider i would look at circuit availability, accuracy of billing and charges, and other items that are contractually driven.

is this getting close to what you are asking??

[Guest]

Thanks for the feedback -

this telephony installation is for internal use with internal customers - responsiveness to providing new phones, fixing broken phones, and airtime availability are some of the key metrics thus far that seem to make sense - availability and fixing what's broken -

[javierarcal]

Hi

You should define different categories for this phone incidents or problems so you can appy the proper SLA according with incident type and may be you should define different users profiles to apply different SLAs or OLAS if the user is (VIP or not for example)



Hope it helps

Javier

[TBlank]

Thanks for the suggestion Javier - fortunately, we already have a system that ranks incidents by priority and I have targets for those. Availability seems to be the big metric in telephony. At least, that seems to be what matters the most.