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 avoiding using availability as a measure and instead use reliability and recovery time. Tip 4 states SLAs should be reviewed and updated every 12 months. The tips aim to make SLAs more meaningful, avoid conflicts and strengthen the relationship between IT and users.
ITIL For Those Who Don't Have The Time
Understand and implement ITIL Service Support without shedding blood!
The ITIL Heroes Handbook gives you a quick backgrounder on ITIL basics and dives deep into ITIL Service Support with examples drawn from customers. It packs some action; you get to implement a Service Desk to understand how easy it is.
Oh, I almost forgot the comic approach keeps you awake while you are trying to read all the stuff.
The digital transformation to Agile + DevOps is more than a technology upgrade. Plutora’s innovative Value Stream Management (VSM) platform converges toolchains throughout a portfolio into one bidirectional data pipeline, making work visible across the IT organization. The VSM platform then guides an organization’s digital transformation with its centralized management of IT processes and real-time analysis of work data.
ITIL For Those Who Don't Have The Time
Understand and implement ITIL Service Support without shedding blood!
The ITIL Heroes Handbook gives you a quick backgrounder on ITIL basics and dives deep into ITIL Service Support with examples drawn from customers. It packs some action; you get to implement a Service Desk to understand how easy it is.
Oh, I almost forgot the comic approach keeps you awake while you are trying to read all the stuff.
The digital transformation to Agile + DevOps is more than a technology upgrade. Plutora’s innovative Value Stream Management (VSM) platform converges toolchains throughout a portfolio into one bidirectional data pipeline, making work visible across the IT organization. The VSM platform then guides an organization’s digital transformation with its centralized management of IT processes and real-time analysis of work data.
Many states and cities across the US are promoting or succumbing to additional customer-sited Distributed Energy Resources (“DER”) such as solar and storage. As the number of grid interconnections increase, the following challenges (and effects) are arising:
1. Managing the manual approval process – straining the utility’s ability to meet service levels
2. Lack of consolidated data from installed DER’s – limiting the utility’s ability to plan its system, respond to outages, or account for resources in planning, operations and system load forecasting
3. Limited collaboration and communication tools between cities and utilities as they inspect systems – resulting in inefficiencies and redundancies
4. Difficult to forecast distributed generation – impacting system load requirements
As a refresher, Connect-the-Grid™ provides utilities, municipalities, and cooperatives the ability to:
1. Ease the application submission process through use of electronic forms by customers and contractors
2. Leverage workflow management features to better allocate staff resources
3. Utilize the master data set for DER asset tracking and reporting/dashboards
4. Deliver automatic notifications to utility staff when applications approach approval time requirements
5. Perform real-time distributed generation forecasting and more!
Contractors and electricity customers also benefit from the use of Connect-the-Grid™ through an improved customer experience.
Distributed generation an opportunity for positive customer engagement finalWest Monroe Partners
The deployment of distributed generation (DG) such as rooftop solar continues to grow and is beginning to have a significant influence on the philosophy, design, and operation of the distribution system. In 2013, the price of solar systems dropped nearly 15% and the number of installations increased by almost 20%. With interest growing and costs trending downward, there is a new solar installation being completed roughly every 3 minutes! These types of radical, fundamental changes in any industry can pose a challenge, but within these changes there is also a significant opportunity for electric utilities to fundamentally (and positively) redefine their relationship with their residential customers considering adopting DG.
West Monroe Partners has collected data on four key channels customers use to interface with their utility and the relative amount of difficulty or effort each of these channels presents to customers. These four key levers are ideal in improving overall customer effort and satisfaction:
1. Customer Portal
2. Public Website
3. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
4. Live Agent
Our preliminary comparisons for a range of utilities offer some valuable insights. Please join us as we share the results with you and your team and suggest some action items and potential solutions that could drive significant improvements throughout the meter-to-cash process.
Service Management in a DevOps World - by Helen BealPlutora
Read this book to understand the evolution of Service Management in modern software delivery, including:
- How to evaluate your current state and create a path to continuously improve.
- The role of DevOps in Change, Releases, Security, Support and Incidents
- Product focused teams and value flows management.
Your Challenge:
Impending audits intimidate CIOs and business executives – and for good reason.
A failed audit can result in punitive fines and injunctions that disrupt continuing operations until violations are resolved.
These highly visible failures are best prevented through auditor-enterprise collaboration and pragmatic audit management.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
Shift the audit paradigm: auditors need to be enabled, not resisted.
Auditors provide a value-added service that you are paying for. Establishing an effective relationship and enabling the audit team can ensure you get value from the engagement. However, you must also be vigilant in mitigating the risk of damaging findings
.
Impact and Result
Effective audit management means acting with kindness to establish an effective relationship and taking vigilant, calculated steps to reduce the risk of adverse findings.
Clarify the audit scope and prepare documentation in advance.
Start off on a positive note and enable the auditor.
Manage audit logistics to minimize business disruption.
Dispute unwarranted findings.
Continuously improve your auditability.
A well-designed IT Service Delivery Model is critical to achieving success in IT management and operations. Many IT organizations focus on optimizing their technology assets -- the infrastructure and applications. However, in our experience, business value is achieved most effectively when technology assets and the IT service delivery model are integrated and work together seamlessly.
Many states and cities across the US are promoting or succumbing to additional customer-sited Distributed Energy Resources (“DER”) such as solar and storage. As the number of grid interconnections increase, the following challenges (and effects) are arising:
1. Managing the manual approval process – straining the utility’s ability to meet service levels
2. Lack of consolidated data from installed DER’s – limiting the utility’s ability to plan its system, respond to outages, or account for resources in planning, operations and system load forecasting
3. Limited collaboration and communication tools between cities and utilities as they inspect systems – resulting in inefficiencies and redundancies
4. Difficult to forecast distributed generation – impacting system load requirements
As a refresher, Connect-the-Grid™ provides utilities, municipalities, and cooperatives the ability to:
1. Ease the application submission process through use of electronic forms by customers and contractors
2. Leverage workflow management features to better allocate staff resources
3. Utilize the master data set for DER asset tracking and reporting/dashboards
4. Deliver automatic notifications to utility staff when applications approach approval time requirements
5. Perform real-time distributed generation forecasting and more!
Contractors and electricity customers also benefit from the use of Connect-the-Grid™ through an improved customer experience.
Distributed generation an opportunity for positive customer engagement finalWest Monroe Partners
The deployment of distributed generation (DG) such as rooftop solar continues to grow and is beginning to have a significant influence on the philosophy, design, and operation of the distribution system. In 2013, the price of solar systems dropped nearly 15% and the number of installations increased by almost 20%. With interest growing and costs trending downward, there is a new solar installation being completed roughly every 3 minutes! These types of radical, fundamental changes in any industry can pose a challenge, but within these changes there is also a significant opportunity for electric utilities to fundamentally (and positively) redefine their relationship with their residential customers considering adopting DG.
West Monroe Partners has collected data on four key channels customers use to interface with their utility and the relative amount of difficulty or effort each of these channels presents to customers. These four key levers are ideal in improving overall customer effort and satisfaction:
1. Customer Portal
2. Public Website
3. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
4. Live Agent
Our preliminary comparisons for a range of utilities offer some valuable insights. Please join us as we share the results with you and your team and suggest some action items and potential solutions that could drive significant improvements throughout the meter-to-cash process.
Service Management in a DevOps World - by Helen BealPlutora
Read this book to understand the evolution of Service Management in modern software delivery, including:
- How to evaluate your current state and create a path to continuously improve.
- The role of DevOps in Change, Releases, Security, Support and Incidents
- Product focused teams and value flows management.
Your Challenge:
Impending audits intimidate CIOs and business executives – and for good reason.
A failed audit can result in punitive fines and injunctions that disrupt continuing operations until violations are resolved.
These highly visible failures are best prevented through auditor-enterprise collaboration and pragmatic audit management.
Our Advice:
Critical Insight
Shift the audit paradigm: auditors need to be enabled, not resisted.
Auditors provide a value-added service that you are paying for. Establishing an effective relationship and enabling the audit team can ensure you get value from the engagement. However, you must also be vigilant in mitigating the risk of damaging findings
.
Impact and Result
Effective audit management means acting with kindness to establish an effective relationship and taking vigilant, calculated steps to reduce the risk of adverse findings.
Clarify the audit scope and prepare documentation in advance.
Start off on a positive note and enable the auditor.
Manage audit logistics to minimize business disruption.
Dispute unwarranted findings.
Continuously improve your auditability.
A well-designed IT Service Delivery Model is critical to achieving success in IT management and operations. Many IT organizations focus on optimizing their technology assets -- the infrastructure and applications. However, in our experience, business value is achieved most effectively when technology assets and the IT service delivery model are integrated and work together seamlessly.
If you are reading this, then you’ve probably decided or been asked to implement a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Questions are starting to run through your head like “What’s all the fuss about? How is this going to help the company, our employees, and our team? Realistically, what are the downsides and how do we avoid them?”
Well, you’re in luck. This whitepaper lays out everything you need to know about SLAs. By the time you finish reading this, you will be able to successfully plan, implement, report, improve on your SLAs, and reap the associated benefits.
IT managers and people involved in purchase of hardware for your organisation. here is a bit of what you need to know.
and how you could get support from manufacturers when such machines/software break down or need support/ maintenance .
Integrating Service Catalog with the Business - Rapid and Relevant SLAsAxios Systems
To view this complimentary webcast in full, visit: http://forms.axiossystems.com/LP=298
Business and customer buy-in is essential for a successful Service Catalog so it is therefore important to ensure it is integrated with the business for maximum ROI. This video discusses how to get the most out of having a service catalog.
The main objective of IT Service Management (ITSM) is to deliver services our customers want and value while IT manages the cost and risks. To achieve this goal there is no doubt that Service Level Management is one of the critical processes that should be implemented as part of an ITSM program.
Topic The top 5 details that should be included in your cloud SLA..docxjuliennehar
Topic The top 5 details that should be included in your cloud SLA.
Read and respond to below two student’s discussions. (5-6 lines would be more sufficient) reflecting on your own experience, challenging assumptions, pointing out something new you learned, offering suggestions
#1.Posted by Krishnaveni
A service-level agreement (SLA) defines the level of service expected by a customer from a supplier, laying out the metrics by which that service is measured, and the remedies or penalties, if any, should the agreed-on service levels not be achieved. Usually, SLAs are between companies and external suppliers, but they may also be between two departments within a company. In my point of view below are five key things we need to consider.
Disaster recovery and backup
In the event of a disaster, our cloud provider should have a plan in place to prevent total loss of our data. Cloud providers should have a section of the SLA that describes their disaster recovery and backup solutions in detail. Depending on the provider, they may provide automatic backups and snapshots of our data. If the user is required to set up backup and recovery systems, the SLA should outline that. It may not specifically state how to activate them, but we should be aware if we need to activate them or not.
Data source.
“Where is the information coming from that will be used to measure the provider’s compliance?” In many situations, a customer may have to rely on the cloud provider to provide the information; however, increasingly, there are third parties that can help the customer with this. In a perfect world, the data should be auditable by the customer to verify the data’s accuracy, reliability and validity.
Acceptable performance.
This item specifies the minimum level of service that must be provided, and it answers the question, “What do we want from the provider for this particular service?” It flows from and is directly related to the customer’s objectives under the contract. In the cloud, many SLAs are expressed in terms of availability. For example, a SaaS provider may commit to an application availability of 99.5%.
Scalability
Many SLAs are designed to meet the needs of the customer at the time of signing, but we all know organizations can change dramatically in size over time. Make sure the SLA details intervals for reviewing a contract so that if our organization grows larger, our cloud capacity can grow with it (and if our organization happens to grow smaller, we’ll want the option to reduce capacity; no sense it paying for unused capacity).
Customer responsibilities
The SLA is a contract that outlines responsibilities that both the provider and customer agree to. Our cloud provider needs to inform us of what we’re liable for when we enter the agreement. It could be its own section or sprinkled throughout the agreement, but it must tell us what’s expected of us. Make sure we mull over the entirety of the SLA to know what our provider will manage and what we nee ...
The IT service outsourcing governance process should not just be focused on the quality of specific services, or the contract terms and conditions. View this presentation to learn more about IT outsourcing.
Whitepaper di approfondimento dedicato ai vantaggi che un approccio basato sulle best practices ITIL nell'IT Service Management porta alle organizzazioni
ITIL Service Level Agreement PowerPoint Presentation SlidesSlideTeam
This complete deck covers various topics and highlights important concepts. It has PPT slides which cater to your business needs. This complete deck presentation emphasizes ITIL Service Level Agreement PowerPoint Presentation Slides and has templates with professional background images and relevant content. This deck consists of total of nineteen slides. Our designers have created customizable templates, keeping your convenience in mind. You can edit the colour, text and font size with ease. Not just this, you can also add or delete the content if needed. Get access to this fully editable complete presentation by clicking the download button below. https://bit.ly/2yQW2FD
Original article from the Flevy business blog can be found here:
http://flevy.com/blog/itil-business-relationship-management-the-hidden-process/
The Business Relationship Management (BRM) process was introduced into the Service Strategy element of the ITIL Service Lifecycle in 2011, but you’d be forgiven for not being aware of this. BRM is perhaps a little ambiguous, and the line between it and its better-known cousin, Service Level Management (SLM), is certainly blurred.
To better understand the BRM process, it is important to first acknowledge the differences in focus between BRM and SLM:
• SLM Focus - Tactical and Operational
• BRM Focus – Strategic and Tactical
The purpose of the BRM role is to establish and maintain positive relationships with the Business, providing input and guidance into the design and delivery of services that exist solely as a means to provide the desired Business outcomes.
A key element of the BRM role is the need to become aware of and understand any factors that may influence a change in the services that are required. A change in the desired Business outcomes, almost certainly means a change to service provision. As such the balancing act of ‘Supply & Demand’ falls squarely at the feet of the BRM. Equally, the pace of technological change must also be considered as an external factor that could influence service utilization.
Five ways to develop a successful outsourcing contractWGroup
WGroup perspective paper on how to develop a successful outsourcing contratct--A few key aspects of an outsourcing contract typically drive its projected savings and return on investment (ROI). You must carefully consider all of these areas to avoid mixed financial results on your outsourcing project. Strategizing the following five areas can help you develop a successful outsourcing contract. The 5 key ways are contract components, unit pricing, resource volume, dead bands, and renegotiation bands.
“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.
Top Tips for Implementing ITIL successfullyTanya Marshall
Well designed and well managed ITIL based service improvement initiatives will deliver significant benefits in any organisation. Here we provide you with guidance on 5 of the most common (and most damaging) pitfalls that should be avoided when undertaking an ITIL initiative.
This White Paper discusses how a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) can be used as the basis of a Configuration Management System and be used to manage risk and control costs in an IT Service Management environment.
An in-depth white paper exploring the definition of CMDB, how to select a CMDB solution, how to populate it and especially how to make it work within a CMS.
It also looks at the role of a CMDB in two key ITIL processes – Change and Incident Management.
White Paper: Knowledge management within ITSMTanya Marshall
*Finalist in the itSMF “Thought Leadership” Awards 2015*
This White Paper discusses how Knowledge Management (KM) can be used to manage risk and control costs in an IT Service Management environment.
The paper identifies four “hot spots” based on the author’s experience, outlines common problems and suggests solutions for using effective KM.
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