Service Level Management (SLM) is one of the five components of the service delivery area. ITIL®. It is arguably the most important set of processes in the ITIL® framework. The SLM process provides a framework through which services are defined, service levels required to support business processes are agreed upon, service level agreements (SLAs) and operational level agreements (OLAs) are established to meet agreements and service costs are established
Implementing service level management processes allows IT staff to deliver defined service levels more accurately and cost-effectively for the business. Processes ensure that the business and IT understand their roles and responsibilities and empower the business units.
Finally, business units demonstrate to senior management the service levels needed to support business processes, not IT. Integrated continuous improvement processes ensure that as business needs change, IT support services change too.
SLM: Understand and Listen
To align with customer results and expectations, SLM needs to focus, engage and listen diligently addressing customer requests, questions, concerns and day-to-day needs:
- the involvement it is necessary to understand and confirm the actual needs and requirements of customers, not just what the service provider explains or agrees to years in advance. ITIL®4 refers to value as co-creation because it requires customer input and validation.
- To hear it is important as a relationship-building and trust-building activity, to show customers that they are valued and understood. Show customers that they are valued and understood. This helps to get vendors out of “solution mode” and forge new, more constructive partnerships. Every customer is unique and service providers shouldn't have a one-size-fits-all approach.
- Engagement and listening activities provide a great opportunity to build improved relationships and focus on what really needs to be delivered. They also provide the service delivery team with an experience-based understanding of the daily work that is done with their technology, enabling them to provide a more business-focused service. When the customer is engaged and heard, they feel valued and their perception of the service and service management activities improves.
SLM Information Sources
SLM involves gathering and analyzing information from a variety of sources, including:
- Customer Engagement: This involves going through simple, open-ended questions such as what the customer uses the service for, the expected outcome, and how the service provider can help achieve the outcome.
- Customer feedback: Ideally, this is gathered from a variety of formal and informal sources, including satisfaction surveys and key business-related measures such as SLAs and KPIs.
- Operational Metrics: These are low-level metrics from various operational activities and can include metrics such as availability, response time, resolution time, and processing time.
- Business Metrics: They can be any business activity considered useful or valuable by the customer and used as a means of measuring the success of the service. Examples include customer registration, invoicing, and transaction completion.
Once this feedback is collected and compiled for ongoing review, it can be used as input to design appropriate measurement and reporting models and practices.
Benefits of Implementing SLM
Immediate benefits of implementing SLM processes include:
- Enabling a better understanding between business units and IT;
- Set more accurate service quality expectations and effectively measure, monitor and report on service quality;
- Clearly delineating roles and responsibilities;
- Providing the flexibility needed for companies to react quickly to market conditions;
- Creating more accurate infrastructure sizing based on clear definition of service levels;
- Avoid or mitigate the costs of excess or insufficient capacity
- Provide discipline in supporting the internal or external provision of IT services.
The Service Level Management team has strong ties to business process and customer management, IT service financial management, and capacity management. Capacity management provides SLM teams with performance data for SLA adjustments. Service level management communicates information about service failures and interruptions to capacity management for capacity assessment and implementation of necessary changes. Vityl Capacity Management supports service level management by:
- Real-time historical data collection of service performance;
- Determine current service levels used as a starting point in SLA negotiations;
- Provide the performance data needed to make informed decisions about SLAs;
- Allowing you to experiment with various scenarios to determine the resources needed to meet business unit goals;
- Determining if SLAs are sustainable on current hardware or if upgrades are required;
- Track and report on service performance against SLAs on an ongoing basis;
- Proactively alert IT of impending bottlenecks so they can be resolved before service performance is impacted.
Service Level Management Risks and Challenges
The risks involved in service level management are:
- Lack of information or business commitment;
- Lack of the necessary tools to execute the process;
- Not recording business and customer metrics that are difficult to measure and improve.
The challenges of service level management are:
- Identify the right people and engage them with the customer base when designing and agreeing service level agreements;
- If the organization is not familiar with service level management, the appropriate service should be selected;
- SLA requires mutual agreement.
Implementation Procedure for Service Level Management
The following steps are taken to implement Service Level Management in ITIL®:
1- Gather data
Identify an SLM manager and form a team to lead the implementation. The team must perform several functions:
- Assess the current state. Find out where and to what extent CM work is being done today and document current reports, distribution lists, policies and procedures;
- Inventory tools and software currently used for monitoring, capacity planning, performance management and chargeback, all of which support SLM processes;
- Collect budget details related to capacity management work;
- Conduct a gap analysis to reveal areas that require process, training, or software improvements;
- Develop a project plan for migrating to the new organization based on the necessary changes you discovered.
2- Build the plan
The implementation plan must:
- Establish the three main components of capacity management – people, processes and tools;
- Outline the costs necessary to sustain the new organization and build a preliminary budget;
- Determine where the service level manager should be placed in the organization, preferably reporting directly to the CIO, IT Director or within the service management group;
- Describe the workflow, including data inputs, information outputs, and work processes;
- Allocate enough time to train the people doing the work;
- Identify any work required to acquire, consolidate and/or implement capacity and performance tools.
Be sure to communicate the organization and its processes to the rest of the company, preferably through your internal corporate communications team. Once the project plan and budget are complete, they must be submitted for approval.
3- Execute the plan
You will want to execute the project plan in a series of steps:
Assign the team.
- Documentation and publication processes. This is an important step that can take considerable time during initial implementation;
- Acquire and implement tools. Ideally, a single tool will be used to provide the data and reports necessary to accurately report the performance of the service;
- Inventory IT services and create service catalogs. Ensuring that service definitions meet financial management requirements so that usage data can be retrieved and associated with specific services;
- Identify, develop, negotiate and implement SLAs and OLAs. It requires close collaboration with the business units. The SLA and OLA should be one or two pages long and include:
- Related parties;
- Start, end and review dates;
- Scope of Agreement;
- Description of the services provided;
- Roles and responsibilities of each party involved;
- Opening hours;
- Service available;
- Service reliability;
- Support;
- Transfer fee, transaction times and/or response times;
- Change return targets;
- Security requirements and considerations;
- Service continuity;
- Service costs and how they are billed;
- Service report;
- Service incentives and penalties;
- Identify any necessary services not currently provided by IT and resolve any contradictions in service requirements versus contingency recovery time, for example;
- Define metrics to measure success. Make sure you link metrics to business value, not technical metrics. Indicators should be few in number, but concise and direct;
- Produce training materials and implement training programs. Develop training materials and test team members to ensure retention according to the process you design;
- Implement exception reporting and processes and procedures. Two types of reports are required. The advanced reports used to keep management informed often take the form of dashboards that use color to indicate the quality of service. Be sure to report current status and trends. The second type of report is more detailed and is used by SLM teams to identify problem service areas.
4- Start ongoing SLM work
Start the reporting process. Include the ability to:
- Automatically alert your SLM team when services are at risk of missing performance targets due to bottlenecks or sudden spikes in demand.
- Automatically alert the SLM team when trends show that performance is approaching agreed thresholds so that corrective actions can be taken to prevent service disruptions or poor performance.
Schedule monthly or quarterly review meetings to discuss service performance results. Initiate any necessary changes as a result of unforeseen business events or changes in business priorities.
Post implementation review
Document lessons learned and identify any process changes that should be made to facilitate future process migrations. Conduct a post-implementation review 6-12 months after completion to determine if the new process is being followed and if you are achieving the expected results.
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