Validating Metric Reports from Outsourcing Partner

[Lesley]

I am struggling with in-house validation of monthly SLA metrics reported by our outsourcing partner. Our vendor delivers a monthly report on SLA metrics outlined in the contract, but I can't seem to find an efficient method for confirming that what they are reporting is accurate.

How do you handle the SLA reconcilliation process? Do you rely on your outsourcing vendor to tell you if they are hitting their SLA's?

Thanks,
Lesley Osterman
Contract Coordinator

[m_croon]

Do you have a provision in your contract with the outsourcing partner, where they are obliged to allow an anual audit of their work by an external partner (appointed by you)?

That's what I would do. And if the results are not satisfactory, you could have a third party do more regular checks.

Cheers,

Michiel

[JennBurn]

Michiel,

Depending on the size of your company and the resources available to you, I sometimes ask the supplier to provide me with the Raw data so that we can do the calculations internally. However there are cases that we do not have the knowledge base to validate the information. Thus the reason one of the clauses that I have started implementing in all of my Supplier contracts is that when conducting our audits, (either our internal auditors or external auditors) we should find faults with results based on the monthly reports, we are able to apply the chargebacks for all the months previous from the date of the last audit.

In addition if you are not meeting your internal SLA's up time of applications etc... this may trigger a closer look at your suppliers performaces.

regards,

[JennBurn]

sorry my previous post should have been addressed to Lesely!

Regards,

Jenn
Service Level and Problem Management Manager

[Yorkie]

Lesley,

If the SLAs have teeth in that financial penalties are applied to miised targets, then both parties will need to aqree the method for reconciling the data. Independant sources of data via an audit are useful but is once a year enough?

Validation of actual data, whether reponse times or incident fix times is both time consuming and expensive. Time can be wasted arguing about pennies. The SLA needs to address these issues upfront and make the SLA a workable solution. Any costs involved in delivering the data need to be included upfriont also. The authors of the SLA and contract must involve the Service Management people who will run with the SLA in production.

If service spans several suppliers, i.e Data centre, network and frontend suppliers its even worse, you need an end to end SLA.

Good Luck