The document provides 5 tips for creating effective Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between IT departments and user communities. Tip 1 is to keep SLAs short at a maximum of 2 pages and only include essential information. Tip 2 is to remove caveats and excuses from the SLA. Tip 3 recommends using reliability and recovery times instead of availability to measure service quality from the user perspective. Tip 4 states that SLAs should be reviewed and updated every 12 months to remain relevant. The tips aim to make SLAs more useful documents that improve rather than damage the relationship between IT and users.
1. Introduction
“Service Level Agreements are the cornerstone upon which effective IT Service Management is based,
and they are central to building and maintaining a positive relationship between the user community
and the IT Department”.
It is not possible to understate the benefits of good Service Level Agreements however, we rarely see
good Service Level Agreements in practice.
Almost without exception they tend to be documents written by someone in the IT Department, from an
IT perspective; and they generally relate to what IT thinks it should (or should not) do.
As a result, most Service Level Agreements are largely unused and unloved. They sit on a shelf
gathering dust, only seeing the light of day when somebody in IT needs to check the definition of
Availability just to make sure that the last e-mail outage does not count as a period of unexpected
unavailability.
Because of this, it would be fair to state that the great majority of Service Level Agreements are at best
rarely referred to – and at worst they can actually lead to a deterioration in the relationship between
the user community and IT.
This guide provides you with 5 simple and practical tips to help make sure that your Service Level
Agreements are worthwhile and add value to your business.
These tips are not intended to provide an exhaustive and definitive list of all the things you need to
consider when putting in place Service Level Agreements.
Instead they are intended to provide you with some key nuggets of practical advice that are not found in
any of the standard ITIL books. They come from our experience of helping multiple organisations to set
up and maintain truly effective Service Level Agreements.
There is no getting away from the fact that some of these tips contradict the advice provided by ITIL.
This is not meant as (and should not be taken as) a criticism of ITIL. Rather it is simply an honest
reflection of where we have found that the advice given by ITIL does not work effectively in a real world
situation.
Charles Fraser, Partner Consultant (ITIL, ISO20000)
info@cihs.co.uk
4 Tips for better Service Level Agreements