Organisations often refer to SLA Frameworks or Service Level Agreement Frameworks – typically this somewhat nebulous phrase will refer both to the scope of services which are to be covered by SLAs aswell as the governance process which will be put in place to ensure that Service Levels are adhered.
The existence of an SLA Framework is by no means standard in organisations which use shared services – many organisations believe that SLAs drive the wrong kind of behaviour – particularly in the context of shared services. This view is almost never held in the context of Outsourcing. Most organisations do however tend to spend lots of time and effort discussing SLAs and most will in fact decide at least to wrtie them on a service by service basis.
Deciding to actually build an overall SLA framework is the sign of a much more sophisticated organisation. They will tend to have multiple SLAs, probably all managed by individual Service Managers but through the use of one SLA Monitoring tool. Increasingly these tools are sourced from third parties, they are online and they allow access to accurate and uptodate information on Service Provider performance. Most companies face various challenges implementing service management across all their SLAs.
Much of the effort associated with building an SLA Framework will be wasted if you dont actually manage the SLAs effectively – make sure that you can start by actually managing SLAs effectively. The best way to do this is to ensure that you get an Service Level Agreement (SLA) management tool which you can get up and running quickly (this will ensure that you can add new SLAs when you get them quickly also) , in the current climate we would suggest you also get a Low cost Service Level Agreement (SLA) management tool .
