PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES
Service level management exists to ensure that services fully align with the needs of the business and meet the customers’ requirements for functionality, availability and performance. The aim is to ensure that levels of service are negotiated and agreed with customers and all services are delivered to the agreed service levels defined in terms of agreed performance indicators. SLM must also ensure that services are continually improved where improvements are required by the customer and can be justified in terms of their cost.
SLM is vital to continual service improvement (CSI). SLM’s objective is to maintain and improve IT service quality by a continuing process of agreeing, monitoring and reporting on IT service achievements and initiating corrective action where there is a business case for doing so and the business agrees that action should
be taken. SLM supports the seven-step improvement process because SLM
determines what is to be measured, monitored and reported. It works with the business and customers to agree new requirements and identify service
improvement opportunities and priorities. This information and the activities it drives are an important part of CSI.
The purpose of the SLM process is to ensure that all delivered services are
monitored and measured against the agreed levels of service and that the results, expressed in accordance with the customers’ needs, are reported regularly to the business and customers.
The objectives of SLM are:
• to build and maintain effective, productive relationships with customers;
• to define and agree with customers the required levels of IT services in a way that customers understand;
• to manage the performance of services to ensure agreed levels are achieved and that customers are happy with what they receive;
• to ensure systems are in place continually to improve service levels if the
organisation wants it and the cost is justified and affordable.