A service level management system ensures that all IT services provided to customers comply with agreed standards of quality. It also includes ensuring that Service Level Agreements are in place and being observed, measuring and reporting on service levels, and continually striving to improve the quality of service offered over time.
It is crucial to have the right tools in place for all of this. Often, the systems and processes that define service levels are outsourced to third party companies. It is important to know how to manage them within your own SLM process.
The first step in setting up an SLM process is to identify the most essential services for the business, and then establish appropriate measures of success. This usually involves taking into consideration factors like efficiency in terms of user base, efficiency, and design aspects. It is also important to choose the right technology expert – for example an organization that specializes in a specific platform may be able to promise higher levels of performance than a more generalized service provider.
After the SLA targets have been set the teams must establish a strategy to keep them. This usually means implementing systems that monitor progress and alert the team automatically when there are problems in meeting the targets.
Furthermore, a strong SLM process will have built-in continuous improvement processes. These will help teams to learn from the metrics they collect, and then find ways to improve the processes that cause problems. If, for instance a NOC service is consistently failing to meet its SLA of answering calls in 30 seconds, then it should be possible identify the root cause and correct it.