Service Level Agreement (SLA) : It is an agreement between Service provider and the Customer.
- If XYZ bank takes IT related services from an ABC IT company. Then there will be an SLA between XYZ and ABC. That SLA will include the services provided by ABC, quality of the services, time bound for the services etc. Also, if the quality of services are not as per agreement then what kind of penalty to be paid by ABC to XYZ etc. T&C also mentioned in SLA.
XYZ bank ==> Customer
ABC IT company ==> IT Service Provider
How the SLA duration's are decide ?
- Basically, everything is planned keeping customer at the center. In this case customer is nothing but Employee's of XYZ company. If they are facing IT related issues and the issues are not addressed as per SLA, they it will hamper XYZ's core business. Keeping this in mind Response Time and Resolution Time for a ticket (incident) is decided.
- If an employee is facing an issue with logging, then the response and resolution time may be 2 hours and 5 hours respectively. But when the same issue is raised by 10 employee's then the severity / priority of the ticket is increased and response time and resolution time may change to 1 hour and 3 hours respectively. What if the same issue is raised by 100 employee's? Now this is a very severe issue and needs to needs to be addressed immediately. So response time and resolution time in this case may change to 30 min and 1 hour respectively.
Operation Level Agreement (OLA) :
- Extending above example a bit. ABC company started providing IT related services to XYZ. Now, this IT related services include Software related, Hardware related, Database related, Networking related etc. services. A single department cannot fulfill all these requirements. So ABC company has various internal departments providing these services. In an incident / ticket, there is a possibility of involvement of 2 or more departments. There should be some agreement between these departments. This agreement is called as OLA.
Underpinning Contract (UPC) :-
- Extending above example a bit more. XYZ Bank wants to use ServiceNow features to manage all incidents to improve and optimize their internal processes. XYZ company has all IT related departments but does not have sufficient skills resources to implement ServiceNow features. They will find a partner / vendor (eg. HBK Ltd) in the market who can provide ServiceNow services. Then again ABC IT Company and third party service provider ie. HBK Ltd will have an Underpinning Contract between them.
Response SLA :
- Response time is the amount of time between when the customer first opens the ticket and when the agent first responds. It is the time customer gets response to the ticket raised.
Resolution SLA
- Resolution time is the amount of time between when the customer first opens the ticket and when that ticket was closed.
Retroactive Start :
- This reflects the actual time the user contacted service desk.
- XYZ bank User è Printer is not accessible over cloud è service desk è 10:30 AM è 5 hours è Hardware team è Error Message è Assigned to other group è SLA canceled and Another SLA attached è Time from the incident is raised.
Normal SLA :
- New SLA attached è Start counting from beginning è always have 5 hours left when new SLA is attached
If this article is useful for you to understand about SLA , please take some time and efforts to mark article as Helpful. Thank you for your time !!!
Warm Regards,
Rishikesh
