Vihreä Ruusu - Service Level Management

Vihreä Ruusu

Service Governance	Service Level	Processes and Practices
Mode of Operation	Vendor Relations	Availability

Suomeksi

Matti Grönroos CV

Matti Grönroos

Service Level Management

Service Level Management is perhaps the most central practice to control and steer continuous IT services. It interfaces to virtually everything, and it must be resourced with people having a mandate to make decisions. It is the tactical and operations level instrument to implement the governance model of continuous services.

A key part of service level management is to "translate" IT reports and other information to the language the management and the business stakeholders understand. The other way round, it is about translating the business-related requirements and constraints to IT targets and actions.

Service Level Management is about a very wide spectrum of various tasks, from technology-oriented analysis and planning to those ones close to the businesses and service contracts.

The tasks include but are not limited to

Set and document the targets of service level metrics
Review and analyze the actual service level
Agree on corrective actions
Interaction with users, service recipients and service providers
Measure, analyze and develop user and stakeholder satisfaction
Expectation Management
Steering the Continual Service Management, considering the business constraints
Keep the service contracts up to date
Acceptance of new services

The Service Level Management can be thought of as a mixer that converts the information it receives into actions:

New information is constantly created on the left side of the chart. Large data masses are generated from the operational systems, and they are typically refined into monthly reports. (Events needing an immediate action are dealt with as a part Incident Management or other operational processes.) During the review meetings, the participants agree whether the service is valid and meets the SLA targets or not. If needed, a decision on further actions is made. Such actions might be virtually anything.

The service agreement, especially the SLA section and the agreed quality targets is the main framework for the service delivery. The users and service recipients form the main dynamics to the delivery outside the data center. They have expectations to be met, and they give feedback. The Service Level Management is about keeping balance across all these realities, constraints, and needs for improvement.

It is quite common that Service Level Management is strongly focused on the formal numerical SLA quality metrics. This easily is a problem, because those metrics typically represent only a small fraction of all service delivery aspects. To overcome this, it is good to listen to weak signals and informal customer and user feedback because these usually reflect the actual quality level better than the figures. Active listening to the stakeholders might also prevent the watermelon from ripening too far.