A process to manage service levels ensures that all IT services delivered to customers meet agreed-upon levels of quality. It involves ensuring that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are in place, being fulfilled and that service levels are tracked and reported.

It is crucial to have the right tools in place to achieve all of this. Often the systems and processes used to define service levels are leased out to third party. Therefore, it is essential to know how best to manage them in the context of your own SLM processes.

The first step in setting up an SLM process is useful site identifying what services are important to the company and establishing a reasonable set of metrics for success. This typically involves analyzing factors like efficiency in terms of user base, efficiency, and design aspects. It is also essential to choose technology expertise carefully For instance companies that specialize in a particular platform may be able to guarantee higher levels of performance than a generalised service provider.

Once the SLA goals have been established and the teams have to put a plan in place to meet them. This typically means implementing systems that track the progress of the team and notify them automatically when there are problems in achieving targets.

A strong SLM process also includes ongoing improvement processes. These will enable teams to take the information they collect, and find ways of improving the processes that are causing them issues. For instance, if a NOC service is consistently failing to meet its SLA of answering telephone calls within 30 seconds, then it’s likely to be possible to determine the root cause and correct it.