Reading SLA reports can drive a mixture of responses. (aside from sleep :>). Typically people will either nod knowingly or with fury. This is the assurance reaction – is my service being delivered as expected – are KPIs red, amber or green? Sometimes this is done very manually using spreadsheets and e-mails and man hours and man months. Some use more user friendly tools which reduce time and improve the output! This is the concern for how service is actually delivered right now – it is important but it is not the full story. Governance is a much more significant and robust process – it is using information about service and relationship quality to steer your organisation and business to better value. It is a proactive activity focussed on analysis not collection of data.
Good governance should take place at an organisational as well as a relationship level. The inputs for governance include information on SLAs – but also risk, issues and customer satisfaction. If you want to move from a proactive reaction to SLA reports to a genuinely proactive approach to steering relationships to drive value then you need to have a consistent and clear approach to collecting this input information. Your process should look like this….
Is this how you do it??
The collection process drives unnecessary time and effort. If you want to accelerate the path to value from your sourcing relationships – then drive down collect effort and ramp up analysis.
