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Trapped by a Watermelon SLA?Ending with a Watermelon SLA is not desirable, and proactive actions shall be taken to prevent it from happening.A watermelon is green outside and red inside. It is not uncommon for the users and service recipients to express their dissatisfaction even if all numeric SLA metric targets are met. The reality is like a watermelon: red inside but pretends to be green looking outside. The service providers have decades of experience in how to show green even if the reality would be bright red. The customers are
not guilty either.
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Fit-for-Purpose or Best-of-BreedA very key question related to IT service is what the target degree of being fancy is. An engineer would most probably give a different answer from the company financials people.The fit-for-purpose thinking is about delivering quality and features good enough for the business case. Not too low, not too high. When negotiating the service agreements, the fit-for-purpose is about avoiding unnecessarily high SLA targets, and unnecessarily expensive management tools. However, especially in the techno business, gaining credibility and reputation might need to invest into best-of-breed tools even if they
were an overkill. In general, the younger generation engineers are not fully aware on the cost implications, and they value
the best-of-breed thinking.
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Setting the BaselineThe negotiating outsourcing agreements is often a top-secret exercise, for many reasons. It is usually difficult to get detailed information about the workload of the service maintenance and delivery during the negotiation. That is the initial SLA targets are usually based on educated guesses. The guesses may be quite wrong, and therefore leading the operations in a wrong direction.A working approach to cope with this problem is to create a baseline: From day one, the real processes are followed, but the
targets are not binding. Instead, during the transition period the data is collected to find reasonable and realistic targets.
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You Get What You MeasureTraditionally, the IT service level management is pretty engineer-oriented: Only numeric indicators matter.Too many service level indicators easily lead to the loss of the big picture. As our top management loves figures and reports, we create a set of metrics where everything is measured numerically. Then we review and analyze them. Then we delude ourselves that this is the way to create a credible view of our service level. Nobody has invented a single metric to describe the success of the IT service delivery. If there is single SLA metric only, the service
provider will optimize the delivery in a way to show this metric always green. However, this is only partial optimization, and the tasks outside
the scope of this single metric may receive too little focus. Sounds familiar?
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Highest Quality Target ≠ OptimumThe service level targets, and the price tag of the service agreement are very closely correlated. It is like buying a car: If you want to have a Ferrari, you must pay more than for a standard car.Quite often, the customer insists on targeting for 90 % success for the Incident Management. 90 %, OK. But 90 % of what? Usually, Incident Management is measured by a statistical indicator like "X per cent of all incidents shall be resolved within Y hours".
The vendor knows very well the dynamics of those figures. When X grows, then Y must grow, too. And this has implications.
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Are Your Metrics Valid?Nice to know, says the top management. To keep them happy, let us produce information for them. Technical systems are good, because they produce masses of informationThe next step is to turn the metrics to SLA targets. This is a good way to steer vendors, we believe. But are your metrics relevant? Do they measure something which the businesses are interested in? Or do they exist just because it is nice to know? Are your metrics trustworthy? Can they be manipulated by the vendor? Or would you like to manipulate them?
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