In materials procurement it has long been accepted that tight management can reduce your procurement costs, by ensuring that refunds and discounts are taken, faulty or unused materials are returned and that renegotiation are conducted with enough data to drive a better deal.
» More: Why measure Service Level Agreements? Part 2 – Reducing Provider Cost
It has been long accepted that when you measure a process, the outcomes improve. Every top class operations team has dashboards, tickers, whiteboards, and a raft of other measurement tools. Why would we drop that approach when we use a separate service provider, be they outsources or in a shared service centre?
» More: Why measure Service Level Agreements? Part 1 – Driving Value
Organisations frequently turn to external advisors to support decision making and implementation of new sourcing arrangements – whether it is outsourcing, shared services etc. Sourcing Advisors have traditionally focussed their support on the strategic decision making process and the implementation. My sense is that ongoing measurement of the value and effectiveness of sourcing deals has largely been a ‘no go’ area for advisors. They typically agree to leave the building at project end and the client Service Management team or Shared Services Team remain to manage the service on a day to day basis. The contacts I have had over the last number of week from advisors suggests that this ‘clean break’ approach is changing.
» More: How Sourcing Advisors are planning to deliver ongoing value to clients
Organisations are now firmly focussed on cost and quality management. Spend on third party service providers is a key area of focus. The day to day management of Service Level Agreements within organisations has typically been undertaken by operations or service management team. These teams are focussed on managing the quality of service into the organisation – but they have not always provided effective monitoring against the contractual metrics - specifically they do not always alert the organisation to contractual breaches. In many cases operational and service management teams are not motivated to do so as they feel it will also reflect badly on them – afterall they were probably involved in the vendor selection process.
» More: Getting alerted when contractual breaches occur on SLAs?
There was a short note on this blog in recent weeks about end-to-end business metrics. It got me thinking about BSM. What exactly is it and how does it work? BSM is a much used term in IT circles. It essentially refers to the process of ensuring that that when measuring the quality of IT services that one uses business relevant metrics. ‘Business service management (BSM) is a methodology for monitoring and measuring IT services from a business perspective. BSM consists of both structured process and enabling software – wiki. Its all common sense really I suppose. The trouble is that it is extremely difficult to decide what business metrics to use as KPIs and more importantly how to collect actual performance data on them.
» More: Is Business Service Management (BSM) just an IT concept?
The frequency with which SLAs should be monitored is a topic which comes up again and again in our conversations with clients. How often should I actually monitor the SLAs and the SLA metrics? I can be very specific at one level – you certainly shouldn’t be monitoring SLAs daily. In our experience most SLAs are monitored monthly or quarterly. Two of the key factors which seem to impact on the frequency with which the SLA is monitored are highlighted below: » More: How often should I be monitoring SLA performance?
In a recent posting I have discussed the role of SLA Managers extensively. I think it is also worth discussing the role that SLA analysts play in the Service Level Management process. SLA Managers tend to delegate much of the day to day Service Level Management and Service Level Reporting to SLA Analysts.
» More: SLA Analysts…how to spend less time administering and more time analysing
Clearly defining the role of SLA Managers is critical to ensuring effective ongoing governance in Shared Services, Outsourcing and Global Business Services arrangements. Our defintion of the role of the SLA Manager is very clearly defined to ensure effective management of Service Level Agreements using the off the shelf SLA Management tool ServiceFrame. The definition is of general use for those attempting to clearly define the roles and responsibilities of those managing Service Level Agreements (even if not using a good SLA Management solution like ServiceFrame!)
So many of you have asked for a simple and clear SLA Template in document format. So here it is….
One often hears commentators and advisors talk about governance in the context of both shared services and outsourcing. It is a topic which I am very interested in…Service Level Management is part of governance – but what are the other key repeatable tasks that form part of governance? We have been looking at our SLA Management tool roadmap and wondering what additional governance tasks we should include. I have listed some of the key shared services governance and outsourcing governance areas that I can think of. I would really welcome additions to the list…
© 2010 Managing and Monitoring Sourcing Agreements · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
