Authorising Service Waivers

[dwollast]

Hi

I am trying to find clarification on which ITIL discipline is responsible for AUTHORISING service waivers.

We have outsourced the provision of our IT services and have recently re-structured our internal Service Management team to manage our outsourced suppliers. The re-structuring has resulted in the creation of new functional areas 'mapped' to the ITIL processes, each with a functional lead responsible for ensuring that the service in their area conforms to the ITIL processes.

As this is a relatively new way of working for us, we are very much embroiled in theoretical discussions about who should have responsibility for particular activities - authorising service waivers is one such activity!

Our SLAs clearly define our agreed availability targets and we have in place an agreed service credit regime to address any breaches. To run along side this, we are also in the process of introducing (via Availability Management) an Availability Schedule (I assume this is a known term?) which basically identifies planned maintenance / release windows.

The area where we are having difficulty however, is agreeing which ITIL discipline is responsible for authorising downtime outside of these pre-planned windows and thereby effectively agreeing that the supplier will not be liable for any service credits during this downtime. We think we've narrowed it down to the following, but are by no means certain and would very much welcome any other views:

Availability Management
Service Level Management
Change Management

Look forward to hearing what you think.

[Ed]

Hi dwollast

As a Change Manager for a Service Provider - I would have expected this to lie with Change Management - They are running the Forward Schedule of Change in which is contained the details of all outages / Service impacts.

I would expect that as a Customer you would want to authorise (have a say in) any outages to the service supplied to you within the SLA you have agreed with your supplier. All of the discussions around this(service credits etc) should be controlled by the Change Management process.

Regards

Ed

[ryanhardcastle]

Ed, I have a bit of a query regarding your reply.

Of course Change Management would be involved to impact and give overall approval for the change to proceed, but would they necessarily be in the position, or have the authority, to issue a service level waiver?

Change Management, to my knowledge, don't manage the SLAs and their subsequent reporting, they manage the Change process. It seems a little odd to include the ability to exempt a supplier from this reporting in the Change process.

Regards,

Ryan

[Ed]

Hi Ryan

you are quite correct, Change do not manage the SLAs or their subsequent reporting, but the question was about who authorises the down time outside the Scheduled Service Maintenance / ReleaseWindows.

That is Change

Regards

Ed

[ryanhardcastle]

Ed,

You are quite correct however I read the original post differently. I have my own interests in this subject myself and I extracted two questions from the post:

1. Who authorises downtime?

2. Who authorises a service level/reporting waiver resulting from the downtime request?

The answer we agree on and is easily understood is that Change Management authorise downtime through their established processes.

The answer to the second question I think remains unresolved. Who would/should authorise the service waiver after Change have approved the downtime?

Regards,

Ryan

[Ed]

Ryan

I had not picked up on the question you put as the second and unresolved issue - I was focussing on the final paragraph a little too much - Thanks for the prod.

I think that the authorisation of a Service Waiver per se i.e. 'I want to take the sevice down for 4 hours' would be dealt with by Service Level Management as they are the ones to agree the Service with the 'Customer'

Regards

Ed