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While many businesses understand the benefits of some kind of service-level agreement (SLA) with their IT providers, they often neglect to put serious time or thought into drafting one that maximizes the contract. A good SLA should not only lay out customer expectations and terms of service, but it should also provide metrics for measuring performance and provide incentives for a job well-done. Creating a customized SLA could save your business time, money, and provide a better user experience.

Good SLAs address a few key questions:

• What will the provider promise to do, and how will they do it?
• How will their performance be measured?
• How will the SLA adapt to changes?
• What will serve as incentives or penalties?

In answering these questions, businesses can tailor their SLAs directly to the needs of their organization. Be sure your expectations are realistic, comprehensive, and specific. It’s important to have an accurate idea of what is possible and what is impossible. Think of the SLA as an insurance policy. It’s meant to ensure you stay up and running in case of a major disaster, but it’s also meant to help your IT provider perform well in case of a serious meltdown. Like any good contract, an SLA is two-way legal protection, and negotiating the terms up front can ensure that expectations on both sides are reasonable. This is the major reason to establish performance metrics. Do you need faster response times? Do you need to meet a monthly volume goal? Do you need to reduce the total amount of time employees spend on certain tasks? By laying out specific goals and metrics from the start, your IT provider is in a better position to meet your needs.

So why not draw up an air-tight, comprehensive service-level agreement? The answer is simple: you will pay more for services that you might not need. Just as you wouldn’t need a minivan for your solo commute to work, you may not need some of the services your IT provider is trying to throw into your SLA. One easy way to determine exactly what you need to include is to conduct a survey of users from various backgrounds and departments. Find out what really matters to the end user, and you can potentially save a good deal of money by customizing your IT coverage.

One of the most interesting new trends in IT service is the negotiation of in-house service-level agreements. Some companies are starting to write up SLAs with their internal IT groups, complete with metrics, incentives, and penalties. While some might scoff at this idea, suggesting that internal contracts aren’t effective, others have embraced the trend as a way to track cooperation and success between departments. Even though you cannot sue your own IT department for breach of contract, you can use a combination of metrics and incentives to improve their performance. Once compensation is tied to success, everyone will be on board with an internal SLA.

In the end, as with any product or service, the most important measure of success is the overall user experience. Be ready to reevaluate your measurement techniques and criteria if you find a disconnect between the user experience and the metrics you defined in the SLA. If your customers (be they in-house employees or outside clients) see an improvement, then your efforts have been successful. Also, it’s advisable to put a process in place which will enforce the measurements in real time and help ensure that the SLA is being met. This can be done by using tools from companies like Gomez or building your own measurement. Regardless of how you choose to enforce the measurement, creating, communcating and sticking to a good SLA is a win-win for everyone involved - especially the end users.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 Both comments and pings are currently closed.

By Haley January Eckels