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Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 10:15 pm Post subject: SLA development
Hi All,
A bit of advice needed.
I'm tasked with developing SLAs, OLAs and reviewing UCs and have started gathering the information from the business and IT to form a service catalogue.
My problem relates to infrastructure services (backup mgt, patches & upgrades, database monitoring, hardware maintenance etc) I do not believe that the details should be in the service catalogue or SLAs as it doesn't mean anything to the Customer.
But.... where should the details of these services and responsibilities be documented.
I'd say give them a brief mention in support section of SLA, and detail these aspects (backup, patches & upgrades, database monitoring, hardware maintenance etc.) in the OLAs and UCs.
Joined: Sep 16, 2006 Posts: 3110 Location: London, UK
Posted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 7:25 am Post subject:
Look in the ITIL red book for the definitions of what should/could be in an SLA
It is NOT a legal document but it should cover what the customer expects from the service and what the provider expects to provide
For example
A customer wants 24x7 support w/a 2 hour response time to fix hardware faults
The maintenance vendor can promise 16x5 with 4 hour response 8 hour fix time
the service provider should base the service on what they can get from the maintenance vendor
If the customer wants the 24x7 service then the service provider needs to find a vendor who will supply that for the right level of fee and up the fees the customer is charging
If an SLA is NOT clear on what the customer is suppose to get, you get bruised egos ont he part of the customer because he is not getting the service he expected (but did not pay for it - but the sales team promised him) _________________ John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)
Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter
Joined: Jan 03, 2007 Posts: 189 Location: Redmond, WA
Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2007 1:25 pm Post subject: Re: SLA development
Shanners wrote:
Hi All,
A bit of advice needed.
I'm tasked with developing SLAs, OLAs and reviewing UCs and have started gathering the information from the business and IT to form a service catalogue.
My problem relates to infrastructure services (backup mgt, patches & upgrades, database monitoring, hardware maintenance etc) I do not believe that the details should be in the service catalogue or SLAs as it doesn't mean anything to the Customer.
But.... where should the details of these services and responsibilities be documented.
Any advice welcome
Chris
This is the difference between what the IT organization as a whole is promising to the customer (SLA), and what the functional IT groups promise to each other (OLA).
The SLA can state that "IT will ensure that computer equipment will be maintained". Of course that statement is a generalization that cannot be measured, so perhaps a better statement would be "There will be less than 100 lost man-hours per year due to lack of computer equipment maintenance".
The OLA will need to state everything that the functional IT groups will need to do in relation to each other to support the SLA. This will include what the server team will do for patching of the servers, what the desktop team will do to patch the desktop systems, what the DBAs will do to optimize the databases, etc, etc.
The idea is that the promise made in the SLA has to be measurable and completely supported by the OLAs that the SLA is reliant on.
Any service that is provided to the customer should be detailed in the SLA agreed with this customer.
An example is the backup service, you can add it to the SLA describing the service and the way you provide it and stating the level to which you commit to successfully complete a backup during the backup window.
That was just an illustrative example, things may be done in a totally different way.
Shanners, whats your structure in term of customer / IT supplier ?
This could influence how you position it. We outsource our IT. Our suppliers SLA's to us (which are UC's to support our customer facing SLA's) include this information.
Customer facing SLA's tend to include service hours, uptime etc. Thats all they are worried about. The detail temds to lie in the UC's and OLA's
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