We make life easier with the conclusion of SLA

Sooner or later, when organizing technical support in a more or less large organization, we have to deal with this: the SLA.

And then a number of tasks arise, successfully solving which can greatly simplify your life.
So suppose that in our organization there are the following divisions, besides IT:

• administration guide and secretary girls help them in every possible way,
• sellers - who want to work remotely, "bo wolf's legs are fed",
• logistics - know procurement / warehouse / supply / transport, and who want to live well,
• accounting - accounting for everything in monetary terms,
• personnel - the solution of all issues with hiring, vacations, lack of health and staff health,
• safety - so that nothing is stolen,
• marketers - as the site without them.

And may we have a catalog of services from 11 positions:

• workplaces,
• print,
• 1C warehouse
• 1C accounting and personnel,
• Office-software
• site,
• The Internet,
• Internal network
• Telephony,
• CCTV and access control,
• VPN - remote jobs.

So, if you want to do everything according to science , but do not really go into the essence of the support organization processes, you will have to conclude quite a lot of SLAs. each unit needs its own set of services with its generally support conditions, of which there are at least two: VIP and standard, but other options are possible, especially if the company is located in several time zones.

And it becomes clear that even such a small number of basic parameters can easily generate about 60 SLA. That is, of course, there will be 7 agreements with the divisions, but in each there will be 7-10 services with different response options and deadlines for elimination.

Optimize this - typical SLAs

What will happen if you rely on the statistics and the Pareto rule and listen less fantasy requirements of customers on the topic of quality and urgency and dissatisfaction of the authorities in explaining that to satisfy all the businesswomen you need 3-4 more people?
And the fact that measuring the deadlines for the execution of applications and customer satisfaction can be determined for each service the following parameters:

• the level that suits 80% of customers, which will make it possible for most of the claims to take a position supported by statistics that the services rendered to a particular department are of high quality in general and are no worse than the company’s average,
• who (maybe personally) should provide VIP service.

This will reduce the number of options for providing each service to 1-3 options and, using the statistics collected on the timing and satisfaction, to refute too high expectations for response times. What this gives is a typical SLA, which, instead of 60, may well be 25-30 pieces, which is noticeably smaller, especially if the SLA structure is in the form of a framework agreement consisting of the main body and the SLA application set. But these SLAs still need to be concluded.

Optimize further - SLA-offer

Seeing that we already have statistics and are able to distinguish VIP from "non-VIP", then we can think of the following point: "when an employee of a company applies for a specific service, it agrees with the terms of its provision, published publicly . "
Which almost immediately leads us to the conclusion that the SLA in fact can be at the time of applying for the service, if it is presented in the form of the Offer .

With this approach, the following subtleties arise in terms of reflecting the responsibility of IT and business representatives in the SLA:

• the time of acceptance of the offer must be clearly stated in terms of terms and transfer of responsibility to IT and back to the one who applied for the service,
• IT’s clear responsibility for the delay, expressed, for example, in issuing VIP status to several subsequent applications while fixing performance delays or a discount on the amount of service consumed,
  
  • requirements for quality of service, expressed not only in absolute terms, but also allow deviating from the set deadlines in the agreed cases but also within the specified limits, for example: "96% of calls must be completed in the period up to 2 hours, no more than 3% calls are allowed to be performed in a period of not more than 4 hours, not more than 1% of calls are allowed to be performed in a period of not more than 6 hours ",
  • rules for the withdrawal and change of an offer and the rules for changing any of the catalog services - with prior notification of all interested parties and publication of changes on the Internet portal of the IT service.

The above approach will allow, in principle, to refuse to conclude an SLA in most cases , limiting it to:

• coordination of the catalog of services and the text of the offer with the management,
• publication of the above documents on the internal portal of the IT service,
• notification, all, including those who are openly engaged in these rules.

At the same time, the "classic" SLAs in the form of an agreement are preserved, but not in bulk, but for special cases not covered by the offer. For example, round-the-clock availability by phone / internet of server administrators and video surveillance systems, and these will be objectively increased requirements for the quality of service, since they do not fall on any of the standard levels of the offer.

This approach was developed in one fairly large bank (top-15) in 2010-2011.
The text of the offer and an example of the description of the service can be found here . If anyone has any questions - according to the wording used in the agreement - write - ready to explain why it is written this way.

Thanks and greetings to colleagues: Oleg Novikov, Alexander Nikulin, Anatoly Malykhin, Irina Sanina, Yuri Salikhov, Rustem Enikeev.