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SLA establishment - not consultancy

07/09/2010 - 08:14

Why don't we give you advice for SLA establishment?

Because the SLA establishment is ever so much more.

An advice is not enough; it is needed to take part in the work integratedly, understand the operation of the business, help to explore the critical points of the business process, understand and see the IT infrastructure, find and implement the performance indicators (KPIs).

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are established in order to profit both for the business and IT. But a lot of hidden pitfalls may raise in the essential questions of the agreement. Even the definition of SLA is shorn with general using in the jargon: many times - mistakenly - a simple sub-contractor agreement is considered as SLA.

Nowadays we rather should talk about SLA frame system, as at least 1 internal organization unit (e.g. application operation), and one or more internal organization sub-unit (e.g. infrastructure operation, server-room operation and support, network operation... etc.), additionally external suppliers take part in ensuring an SLA of a business-level service. Such an SLA determined on business level (between the application operation and business areas) must harmonized with the entire SLA system that twisted to the manufacturers even.

According to the HumanoIT description the Service Level Agreement definition is the following:

The SLA is a service contract between the service supplier and the orderer, that determines in understandable and acceptable way for both parties the followings:

  • definition of the service;
  • terms of supplying the service;
  • indicators giving detached qualification for service, the values regarding the performance;
  • content and scheduling of the reports,
  • method of change management.

If the requirement of the SLA-based operation raised on the IT side, the description of the services, the content of substantive agreement and the selected indicatiors can become technology-based to a fault.

A business manager can describe totally different indicators than an IT manager. For the business manager, a CPU-performance indicator is not relevant; additionally the 99,9% availability of the standalone systems is not enough to evaluate the quality of business service process that uses several systems.

The frequently raised problem in the planning phase, that the business side must answer professional questions without no relevant capacity; additionally the given indicator is irrelevant for them, then the given indicator does not comply with the terms of their own business accomplishment.

To fulfil the gap between two parties, an outsider mediator can help to make these two approaches converged.HumanoIT leaning on their own business and technology experiences - with the help of their unique approach - can be expert partner of both parties in harmonizing and after it in quick implementation tasks. (The question is: why the quick implementation is substantive?)

As the SLAs are snapshots, reflecting a current status, by the time the long implementation process makes the SLA-based reporting possible, the business claims will have been changed to such an extent that some of the SLA can lose their relevancy.

 Never we can establish a perfect SLA at first; the quicker implementation done the sooner possibility exists for the tuning, harmonizing parameters and measures. That's why the essence of our methodology is that we start with just one or two, critical SLAs and implement them as quick as possible. After it, the other important SLAs can be implemented and during this work the critical, implemented SLAs tuning and so on... Implementing more SLAs (10-20 pcs) at the same time we will face the problem above mentioned.