What is SLA (Service Level Agreement)?

Operational Level Agreements: helping achieve SLAs

Operation level agreements (OLAs) are agreements between various parties involved in service delivery. While one team gets incidents assigned, resolving the incident might require help from other departments. (Read more about Incident management) For example, during employee onboarding, the HR department will need help from the financial department to set up a banking account. Moreover, to ensure that the new employee receives a place in the open space, you’ll need help from someone in the facilities team. Documenting relationships between different parties involved in service delivery will help the primary service provider keep quality high.

OLAs are structured to maintain the main SLA. For example, if the resolution time for the employee onboarding service is two business days, the resolution times for all the needed “supplies” must be within that timeframe.

SLA Management

Service Level Management is a set of organizational processes and procedures aimed at maintaining SLAs and delivering services at the established service level targets.

SLAs are tied to specific services, and each service can have multiple SLAs for every quality level. For example, restoring access to the Intranet portal might be of higher priority for the HR department than for sales managers in some companies. As a result, an Intranet access incident reported by an HR manager will have a different SLA than an incident coming from a sales representative.

Here is an example of how SLAs bring value to IT support. The monitoring system checks the availability of a particular service, for instance, a CRM system. In the event of a service failure, it interacts with the Service Desk, submits Incidents, and sets response and resolution times according to the SLA associated with this service. An SLA typically has an incident resolution guideline that must be followed to ensure no SLA violation occurs during the resolution process.

Users can also manually create incidents when they face issues like a jammed printer in the common area, a non-reacting laptop screen, or a slow internet connection.

The team sometimes fails to resolve an issue timely, within SLA requirements. The incident is then escalated to a higher level. Escalations may include, for example, notifying the manager of the incident owner or reassigning the request to a group of technicians responsible for urgent cases.

SLA implementation effects

The primary purpose of service level agreements is to maintain a level of IT services that would help the business achieve its goals. Besides guaranteeing the quality of services, SLA implementation may bring other advantages.

Building trust between IT and other departments

With implemented SLAs, end-users have higher visibility into IT processes and may know in advance, for example, the request resolution times.

Improving work processes within IT

SLA implementation creates a mechanism that assigns a priority level to each request. In practice, this is done either automatically or involving a technician who determines the priority based on the request description. As a result, more and less urgent requests will fall into separate buckets, and the team’s time will be managed better. Read more about Request Management.

Measuring the IT team’s success

SLAs set clear objectives for the IT team, making it easier to evaluate their performance. In particular, SLAs are widely used as internal KPIs among IT support teams.