A service level management process ensures that all IT services offered to customers are in accordance with agreed-upon levels of quality. It involves ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are in place, are being followed and that the quality of service are tracked and reported.
In order to accomplish this, it’s crucial to have the appropriate tools in place. Ofttimes, the systems and processes used to define service levels are outsourced to third party. It is important to know how to manage them within your own SLM process.
The first step to set up an SLM process is to identify the most essential services for the business, and then establish appropriate measures of the success of the process. This typically involves analyzing factors like efficiency as well as user base and design considerations. It is important to carefully choose the expertise in technology you require and a firm that specializes in a specific platform may be able commit to more efficient levels than general service providers.
After the SLA targets have been set the teams must implement a strategy to keep them. This usually involves setting SLM strategy up systems that can track progress, and automatically alert the team of issues with achieving goals.
In addition, a solid SLM process will have built-in continuous improvement procedures. This will help teams take the information they collect, and identify ways to improve the processes that cause problems. If, for example, an NOC service repeatedly fails to meet its SLA of answering calls in 30 seconds, it should be possible identify the cause and fix it.