The ITIL Service Level Management process seeks to negotiate, define, and agree, monitor and report on service levels with customers. It works in conjunction with other processes such as Capacity Management or Availability Management to ensure that services are delivered at a reasonable level.
The ideal service level management process begins by determining the requirements to be delivered and at what times. This should be coordinated with the IT team and the business. This will help you set realistic and relevant targets that are both achievable and relevant to your business. Teams should also collaborate to determine how these targets are evaluated and what effect this has on the customer experience.
Once these targets have been established after which the SLM should begin by defining the service level requirements and establishing agreements with customers. This includes describing the services (including what is included and what’s not, to ensure there is no room for interpret the terms in a different way) as well as defining escalation and responsibility procedures, and setting performance measures. This should be documented in an SLA.
The SLM process should also include a process for monitoring and reporting on the level of compliance with the service, which will be constantly reviewed to determine if the objectives are being met, or not. Automated alerting systems are crucial in this regard. SLM should be coordinated across teams so that everyone knows what they are accountable for and that they are able to maintain the agreed upon service levels.