Implementation Guide for Service Level Agreements

A practical guide to the implementation of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for managing business processes, including a fully detailed template to fast-track your own SLAs.

The quality Service Level Agreements (SLAs) unfortunately usually only becomes apparent when and service provision has not met the expectation of the client. Sometimes this is because of poor performance of the supplier. However, most times suppliers contend that they have been asked to do things not in their agreement. The unintended consequences of poor SLAs often result in end customer dissatisfaction not just the dissatisfaction of the client receiving the service. In an organisation reliant on sales, lost sales result. In an organisation where the service subject to a SLA is part of a set of internal services, trust is lost.

The Implementation Guide for Service Level Agreements starts by considering the benefits of SLAs and then discusses what services are suitable for SLAs, the creation and suitable length of an SLA an examples of services managed by SLAs.

Next the key tasks in developing a Service Level Agreement are considered, namely the establishment of purpose & objective, establishment of a baseline, pre-implementation tasks, development of the SLA, review of the draft SLA and preparation to manage the SLA.

Then Implementation Guide for Service Level Agreements considers an appropriate fee structure for an SLA, including considerations of unit price, hourly rtates, fixed price, management fee, negotiated price and material costs.

Implementation Guide for Service Level Agreements concludes with a detailed, 13-page, 70-point template allowing you to readily create Service Level Agreements for your own organisation. Implementation Guide for Service Level Agreements will repay you in days of labour for the template alone. The return on getting your Service Level Agreements right is something only you can calculate.