Interesting call to the office yesterday from a member of a very large international organisation. He was a little frustrated that the SLA templates in the Toolkit didn’t give him the exact SLA metrics he was looking for. He got even more frustrated with the answer from my colleague – ‘the toolkit can really only give you examples of metrics that other people have found useful -you need to sit down and figure what are the services involved and how exactly do you want to measure them’
Oct 08
There is much discussion online about the move from Outsourcing 1.0 to Outsourcing 2.0 – what’s it all about? Who knows – I guess we will start to get some sort of clear view over the next couple of months. I would venture that there are some definite trends emerging
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Oct 08
The challenges of keeping people in Shared Services Centres motivated and productive is a major topic in the Shared Services area. At a recent conference in London the topic was addressed both authoritatively and honestly by a number of speakers. It is clear that best practice shared services centres take the issue of employee satisfaction and employee career progression very seriously – the sense I got was they do this a) because these were good organisations like Rolls Royce, the Metropolitan Police and Merck, b) but also because they understand that the best services are delivered by people who are happy, motivated and understand how to progress in the organisation.
Oct 06
Creating SLAs in a shared services environment requires the same disciplines and approach as creating any service level agreement. IT Shared Services have been common over many years. We are now increasingly seeing a requirement for Finance and Accounting Shared Service SLA templates, Recruitment Shared Service SLA Templates, HR SLA Shared Service SLA Templates Specific service lines like Procure to Pay and Record to Report are included in standard Finance and Accounting SLA Shared Service Templates.
Oct 06
The SLA Dashboard is a simple visual representation of the performance of all your SLAs in one place. Ideally you will be able to see the performance of SLAs over a period of time through your dashboard. Many organisations move to a dashboard model in order to ensure that they can assess the overall ‘health’ of the SLA. Typically the green and amber sections of the dashbaord will be glossed over – with the real attention being focussed on the RED areas! For this reason it is important that you can see very clearly on your dashboard why red areas are RED!
Oct 01
Creating a good service level agreement is a key success factor in the ongoing success of outsourcing and shared services deals. Here are a few tips on how to get it right. I also propose to outline a few of the common pitfalls. So what exactly is an SLA? A Service Level Agreement is exactly what it says it is – an agreement that a particular level of service will be provided by one party to another. Some SLAs are internal and some are external. Obviously there is usually a greater degree of legal formality associated with external SLAs. Historically internal SLAs have tended to be less formal – often being referred to as Operating Level Agreements. This approach has changed recently as organisations start to realise that the more informal the SLA the less likely an organisation is to receive the benefits of an internal shared services model.
