Service Level Agreements
This site provides information and advice on service level agreements and service level management. You can also browse our extensive Service Level Agreement bookshop.
While Service Level Agreements are a key method, within ITIL and IT Service Management, of setting out how two parties have agreed that a specific service (usually, but not necessarily, IT-related) will be delivered by one to the other, and the standards or levels to which it will be delivered, the basic concept is now far more widely applied than just in ITIL and ITSM environments.
At the simplistic level, network and internet service providers use SLAs as a means to describe the minimum service to which they are prepared to commit themselves. At a more useful level, SLAs are used between independent organizations, as well as between divisions of the same organization, as an effective means of setting out the planned relationship between the two.
The key words in 'Service Level Agreement' are 'Service', 'Level' and 'Agreement'. It relates, in other words, to services, not to products. Product specifications and supply requirements are efficiently dealt with through traditional procurement arrangements; services aren't.
SLAs must contain clearly defined levels of service; these levels must be capable of measurement, and they must be directly relevant to the effective performance of the service supplier. An SLA that doesn't contain meaningful, measurable levels of performance is not worth the paper it's written on. The linked concept of Service Level Management (or 'SLM') arises from the idea that, if you have agreed levels of service, you should have an agreed method of monitoring performance, of dealing with exceptions and changes - with managing the service, in other words.
Finally, the SLA must be agreed. It is not a weapon for one organization to beat another with and it is not therefore a panacea to all the ills of poor existing service. Those poor performance issues have to be resolved, and a clear future level agreed, before an SLA can be drafted and agreed.
While there are a number of useful books on SLAs, The Complete Guide to IT Service Level Agreements (3rd edition) is probably the best available.
There also two particularly useful, comprehensive, long-lived and valuable SLA Toolkits.
- The first is the SLA Framework: Templates and Tools for IT and Technology 12th edition, which contains checklists and everything you need to tackle, draft and agree SLAs - whether or internal or external;
- The second is the Naomi Karten SLA Bundle, which contains templates and guidance to simplify your SLA creation process.
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Practical Service Level Management: Delivering High Quality Web-based Services |
