The other day during a #itsmbig4 twitter chat
the subject of SLA’s as they relate to CSI came up, which got me to think about
this topic a little further.
The first question I found myself asking “are
SLA’s for the most part provided by IT?” It might be more common than not to
hear IT tell the business, “We will provide service uptime of 99% or some
degree of 9’s.” In some cases there may be no negotiation/agreement at all. IT
may on some level decide that the business needs a certain degree of service
level and based on the ability for IT to support the service, a service level
is generated. This provision may occur whether the business has signed off on
it or not, in fact they may not even be aware that such a service level even
exists. Being in a position to even have an agreement requires that there is
more than one party present. This discussion point is a two way street in which
you need business input. I already know what you are going to say. “If you ask
the business they will say that they need all services up all the time.” Again
this is where the dialog and agreement part come into place which we will touch
on down below.
So where does this tie in to CSI? As the name
suggests we are always looking to improve service but in order to start doing
this effectively we need to discuss where we are today with all our stakeholders
in IT and the business. To simplify this discussion on some level let’s look at
this from 3 basic stages in SLA maturity; No formal SLA’s, SLA’s established in
IT and formal SLA’s established with the business.
No formal SLA’s
In this stage of the game IT has services
which they are supporting, likely with a best effort mentality. The level of
service to your business may be considered adhoc as there is no direction on
how best to provide support for a multitude of services. From a CSI perspective
you really need to understand which service(s) is critical to the business in
an effort to prioritize them from a support perspective. Just because there is no
formal SLA established, doesn’t mean that there isn’t one in existence on some
level. Your support teams may just ‘know’ that the corporate website is a
critical service and treat it as such. I would imagine that the business has
some expectation either way that the service is going to be available for them
to utilize. Even if you initially have no agreements, building a framework of
dialog will allow you to improve delivery to service through an understanding
of what the business needs are.
SLA’s established within IT
The challenge here is that the SLA is an IT assumption
on what they believe the business requires. There may be an expectation from IT
that all services require a standard uptime of 99% for example. This may be
valid to a degree however the challenge is that we still are making assumptions
on what the business needs without engaging them directly. Being able to do
that will allow IT to adjust their OLAs to ensure effective service delivery.
Once you do that you can better position yourself
looking at what support to services will ultimately cost your IT organization,
and ultimately the business. Remember earlier when I mentioned that the
business wants 100% uptime. Positioning yourself to understand the cost of
service will allow you to communicate what 100% would cost.
Formal SLA’s established with the business
In some cases we may have formal SLA’s set up
with our business. The challenge here is that we ensure not only that we manage
these in a balanced way but that they are constantly reviewed to remain valid
over time. A balance support means that it can become very easy to bulk up on
your incident management to ensure that issues are resolved as quickly as
possible but make sure that you are looking at the cause of these issues in the
first place. As I have mentioned before issues which repeat themselves can have
a negative impact to the business even if they seem small and insignificant. Ten
repeat issues which last 10 minutes are the same as a major outage which lasts
100 minutes. When you have a strong understanding of the service and are
supporting it in an effective way you will be better able to agree to terms of
service with comfort that you can cover what you agree to. All too often we set
an arbitrary target for some level of 99% and we tend to coast once we maintain
that level. The CSI question should ask what we are doing to continually
improve our service delivery. We should think about reviewing the SLA’s with
the business on a regular timeframe as their requirements of the service may
change.
The overall theme is to stop assumptions of
what the business needs. Begin a regular discussion with them on the delivery
of their services so that continual improvements can be made. As time goes on
review where service delivery shortcomings are and deal with them in a way
which is not necessarily incident focused but also drives out repeat issues,
perhaps through problems. At the end of the day regularly discussing what is
working well with your business will enable you to continuously improve your
service delivery.
Please feel free to comment or connect with me on Twitter @ryanrogilvie
Labels: #itsmbig4, Continual Service Improvement, ITSM, Service Level Agreements, Service Management