Service Level Management

Service level management (SLM) is one of the five components in the ITIL service delivery area. It is known as the most significant set of processes in the ITIL framework. The SLM processes provide a structure that defines services, and also defines which service levels are necessary to maintain the processes that were established by an organization.

The SLM is also used to develop the Service Level Agreement (SLAs) and Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) in order to assure the agreements and costs of the services that are developed are satisfied.

The execution of SLM processes allows IT staff to more precisely and cost efficiently condition acknowledged levels of service to the organization. These processes make certain that the organization and IT are aware of their roles and tasks, as well as sanction the units within the organization.

When all is said and done the units of the organization are extenuating to the senior management level of service that is needed to sustain the business processes, not the IT. In addition to that the incorporated continuous improvement processes make certain that when the business needs to change the sustaining IT services will change along with them.

Service Level Management Activities

This is a very important aspect of SLM, the activities of Service Level Management include:

• Identifying organizational requirements by working with the organizational units.
• Establishing the scale of services, enduring, hours of function, resurgence aspects, and service performance.
• Translating organizational requirement into IT requirements
• Developing and maintaining a service directory, including costs for different tiers of service performance.
• Performing fissure scrutiny between the organizational requirements and the on hand services.
• Determining the expenses associated to services that service the goals suit production needs at a charge the organization can actually meet the expense of.
• Drafting, negotiating, and refinement of Service Level Agreements with the organizational units, ensuring business necessities are met, and concurrence from all parties concerned.
• The implementation of Service Level Agreements
• Measuring the performance of Service Level Agreements, reporting outcome, and adjusts what is need as essential.

Implementing Service Level Agreements

There are many immediate benefits that come from implementing the Service Level Management processes. These benefits include the following:

• It enables a more adequate understanding between your organizational units and IT.
• It helps with setting more accurate service quality expectations and effective measurements; it helps with monitoring and reporting the service quality.
• It also clearly delineates roles and responsibilities
• It provides the needed flexibility for the organization to react in a timely manner to changing market conditions.
• It helps to create a more precise infrastructure size based on the noticeably defining service levels.
• It allows the organization to avoid or moderate the costs of surplus or unsatisfactory capacity.
• Finally, it provides discipline in sustaining interior or exterior sourcing of the IT services.

An advantage to Service Level Management is that the SLM teams have close ties with to the organizations processes and the customer management, financial management for IT services, and capacity management.

So what does capacity management do? Well capacity management is used to provide data to the SLM team for SLA sizing. The Service level management then passes information pertaining to service gaps and/or interruptions back to the capacity management, so that it can be assessed for capacity and changes can be implemented.

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