Measuring service level agreements is widely assumed to be a good thing.  I sometimes wonder if people realise quite how important it is.  Measuring Service Level Agreements is now the subject of a series of entries on our main blog on Monitoring and Measuring SLAs. 

We have had so many requests for a Word SLA Template or Document SLA Template that we have decided to put one up on the mail blog.  Please remember that most organisations have very specific requirements for SLAs so use it wisely.

SLA Measurement is usually driven by a desire to ensure increased control over service providers and shared services centres or by regulatory factors such as MiFID.  Whatever the reason SLA Measurement - whether it is in Finance, IT, HR, Facilities etc. can often be an extremely manual and time consuming process.    In many cases the manual effort associated with SLA management can lead to neglect in undertaking SLA measurement.  SLA Measurement is the process of ensuring that you get regular updates on performance against agreed SLA metrics. 

Lot of client organisations I speak to still see SLA Management as primarily an activity driven by Service Providers.  Let me be very very clear.  This may be the case – there are many reasons why it evolved that way – but there are more and more reasons why it needs to change.  As a client you need to own your SLA Management process.  You need to own to make sure that you dictate what is being measured, that you own the data on service performance and so you have a solution which can store all your SLAs in one place.

When MiFID was introduced a number of years ago most financial institutions focussed heavily on what the FSA describe as Conduct of Business rules.  There was widespread acceptance that there would be an impact on outsourcing and indeed shared services Service Level Agreements – but the changes necessary were not always made with the level of rigour expected by the FSA.  These organistions are now reviewing their internal and external SLAs in order to ensure that they meet required levels of details.

The drive to shared service or business services ( as they are now sometimes called) is increasing a pace.  We are putting even more free Shared Service SLA templates in the SLA toolkit. 

Is it possible to use a low cost tool to manage my SLAs?  The answer is YES.   Traditionally the choice has been expensive clunky IT solutions which were difficult to deploy and now always applicable to different SLAs.  The next generation of SLA Management tools are intuitive, easy to deploy and low cost or SLA spreadsheets.    Cast aside your spreadsheets, your long implementations and your complex Service Level Management processes.

Well – you need both really….but ideally you want a simple SLA Management tool that will produce the SLA Performance Spreadsheets when you need them. The trouble is that most people managing Shared Services or Outsourcing deals are still relying on spreadsheets as the key tool to manage reporting.  My advice – try something different as soon as possible.

We continue to create additional SLA Templates and host them in the SLA toolkit.  This project has been fulfiling and interesting – we really encourage all Shared Services and Outsourcing executives to share SLAs where they can – we will try to make the SLA metrics and SLA templates available through the toolkit so we can all benefit!