Wow, I can’t believe the amount of stir there is around this topic. Why is there so much confusion? Organizations try to put ridiculous rules, that are for the most part poorly defined and even more poorly enforced, around how critical their IT Services are to the operation of the organization. Does it affect customers’ …
Read more

When teaching some of the intermediate ITIL courses, a fundamental realization came to me that is quite striking. The realization is that you cannot have true Incident Management without a mature Service Level Management process. Let’s say your organization has a tier one application that requires a high level of availability. One day a user …
Read more

Creating OLAs

March 29th, 2014 | Posted by Don Boylan in Service Level Management - (0 Comments)

From the ITIL Community Forum Q: Has anyone had experience of developing OLAs recently?With multiple IT support groups does there need to be an agreement between each group therefore requiring multiple OLA documents. e.g. Agreement 1 – Apps Support & service desk Agreement 2 – Tech support & service desk Agreement 3 – Tech support …
Read more

From the ITIL Community Forum Q: Have you ever met the part of SLA pointing out limits the user should keep? A: Yes, a SLA is an agreement between IT (in its entirety) and the Customers of IT Services. This agreement is a two-way street. The SLA is not just to define the Customer’s expectations …
Read more

From the ITIL Community Forum Q: I am reviewing the current response and resolution time metrics for an internal service desk that supports a 10,000 person company.  Currently the company uses 4 severity levels for incidents.  While I realize the response and resolution times are defined by an SLA, is there a good benchmark to …
Read more

Who Signs SLAs?

March 28th, 2014 | Posted by Don Boylan in Service Level Management - (0 Comments)

From the ITIL Community Forum Q: Who should be the IT owner (signatory) of the SLA and manage the Customer relationships? A: As far as who should be the IT owner (signatory) of the SLA, remember that SLAs are not between functional groups and the IT users. It is between the IT organization as a …
Read more