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The goal of Service Level Management is to maintain and improve the alignment between business activities and IT service quality.
This is achieved through the cycle of:
Agree on service level expectations and record them in Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Monitor the service provided
Report actual service delivery results
Review IT service delivery results in relation to the SLA, and adjust accordingly.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal, negotiated contract that outlines service level expectations and clarifies responsibilities between the Service Desk and its customers. When unacceptable levels of service are noted throughout the service cycle, action can be taken to re-align expectations with actual service delivery results.
Within the system, SLAs are specific and time-based in order to help monitor and report on performance. They can be applied to any of the following elements within the application:
Items
Customers
Organizational Units.
Only Users assigned with the Service Level Management Role can create or modify SLAs.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used by organizations to manage the level of service expected of IT and to ensure optimal maintenance of critical business systems. SLAs are documents that are negotiated between IT and Customer departments, to identify expectations and clarify responsibilities.
Use this section to create and modify SLAs to provide request Lifecycle management capabilities. SLAs in Help Desk are fully configurable and unlimited, which allows for the tailoring of Customer agreements and support plans.
The system also provides SLA-compliance reporting, allowing Managers to define and track availability and performance objectives that reflect business goals. SLAs are used across all processes, and are assigned when requests are created.
Within the Service tab Users can:
Maintain Contracts (when enabled).
When a request is logged with the Help Desk, the request adopts the SLA that has been assigned to either the Item, Customer or Organizational Unit. If an SLA has not been allocated to any of these elements, the SLA assigned as the system default within the Admin>Setup>Privileges>Requests tab will be automatically applied to the request.
The SLA allocated to the request determines the Workflow options made available for the lifecycle of the request. The Workflows listed are assigned the same SLA as the request. Before saving the request, the User can adjust the system assigned Workflow if more than one option exists.
SLA triggers will only fire for Incidents that are assigned a State that is configured as SLA Active. For example, the default system States of Pending or Open.
When an SLA inactive State such as On Hold-Customer Action is applied to an Incident, all SLA triggers stop until the request is returned to a State that is defined as SLA Active.