Its time to change your SLA's

Which SLAs am I talking about?

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From both an IT Managed Service Provider (MSP) or an internal IT support provider (ISP) there are always measures that need to be met.?

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The measures are SLAs (service Level Agreements), KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) sometimes OLAs (Operational Level Agreements) They form the core of the agreements between customer and supplier. When working with MSPs SLAs will often come with financial penalties if they are failed.

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How many times have you seen support agreements based on measures like these.? There are many more examples feel free to add your examples in the comments.

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95% of pX Incidents to be resolved in X hours

PX response time X minutes

XX% system availability

Root cause analysis to be completed in X days

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I started work in 2000 and these measures were being used then, conservatively these measures have been used for 24 years!? I can’t think of anything else in IT that has been unchanged in so long! Can you?

?Absolutely they are LEGACY,?

There are a lot of benefits of these measures, they are clear, easy to understand and to measure.? They are procurement friendly as it makes contracting with MSPs easier, It gives the reassurance of following best practise and IT departments aren’t going to be exposed because their agreements are based on these measures.

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I’ve worked with both MSPs and ISPs I’ ve seen both the good and the bad that these legacy measures underpin from the creation of an RFP to the sunset of the systems/service.? Don’t underestimate how such measures are ingrained in the culture of service provision.? It is hard to move away from these.

Why am I calling these shocking?

They are easy to game

They are IT not business focused

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People hold a lot of pride to the fact they haven’t had to pay service credits.? (ISPs don’t have penalties but the thinking is the same)

There are so many ways to avoid paying them, for example:

?Focus team on the resolution of the measures at risk of paying service credits, e.g. get team focused on aged tickets for the month to make the measure green, even if others turn red.

?Get the team to push back tickets, request additional information, or just close them.

I don't know another sector of service provision that takes pride in being successful at their most basic and core service requirement.

I wouldn't want a prospective childminder to tell me they had never lost a baby before, or a mechanic that excitedly says I put all your wheels back after I changed the tyres. Somethings shouldn't need to be said but boy will it get worse in a second!

Contracts are written to make missing them difficult, you often have to have consistently bad service to pay credits, so a failure of a single measure does not mean you pay service credits. For example, you may need to miss the same measure twice in any rolling 6 month period.

Using my analogy from above its like your childminder demanding they have done a great job despite losing just 1 of your 3 children or the mechanic who has only put 3 of your 4 wheels back on before providing you the keys!

I cant think of another service this situation would be accepted!!!???

Measures should instil the right behaviours on the service providers because people and organisations work to how they are measured. I've seen time and time again teams being focused on the wrong outcome. For example the team that had ticket SLAs built into their performance objective.

Unsurprisingly they had some of the worst behaviours I'd seen to that point, tickets being closed early or stuck in pending immediately.

As a leader you have to set the objective to encourage the right behaviours AND ensure you can identify the negative behaviours.

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Having worked and led in ISPs I can tell you that the business stakeholders rarely like these measures and for good reason.? When developing the business requirements for a service no one in the business will come up with a measure like these.

The business cant pull out a service measure and say yes that's what I asked for.

?Hitting all of the measures does not mean that the business will see a positive outcome.? How many service reviews have you been part of where there is a direct mismatch between the business users perception of the service vs what the SLAs are telling?

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I’d be confident it’s because.

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Meeting the SLA 95% of p1 incidents fixed (or worse a plan to fix )within 4 hours

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95% of critical business processes will be completed on time or to quality.

That's pretty shocking

Conclusion

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Too much time is spent trying working to measures that do not directly translate into business outcomes.? I want measures that encourage the right behaviours and that provides a direct connection between the MSP/ISP and the business users.

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The ISPs need to change by working with their customers, the business understand what they need to be successful and if working with a MSP demand more from them.

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The MSPs need to come to the table with more ambition and vision than pushing 24+ year old measures.? As a partner to their customer, they should be encouraging a closer link to the voice of the business.

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I haven’t seen or heard of either an ISP or MSP do this.? MSPs have talked about making the service business outcome focused but I’ve not heard of an effective example of this.? Have you?

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It’s not easy to change, the first step of resolving an issue is to recognise you have an issue, the second is knowing where you want to get to and third is mapping the route.? I have a model that addresses the disconnect in SLA and business outcome, which I will continue to refine.

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In the mean time have you seen good examples of measure that underpin direct business outcomes?