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The challenges of managing SLA's– kpi itil

The challenges of managing SLA's– kpi itil

In this post, you can ref free useful materials about kpi itil and other materials for kpi itil such as kpi tips, kpi mistakes, kpi examples, kpi templates, kpi dashboard, kpi form, how to create kpi/performance metrics

If you need free ebook:

• List of free 2436 KPIs

• Top 28 performance appraisal forms

• 11 performance appraisal methods

• 1125 performance review phrases

please visit: kpi123.com

KPI guides

We are delighted to post an article on the challenges of managing Service Leve Agreements by ITIL Standards, by Bill Heffernan of SureSkills. 

Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) are fundamental to effective service provision. They provide the basis for managing the relationship between the service provider and the customer, describing the agreement between the service provider and customer for the service to be delivered, including how the service is to be measured. Basically, SLAs are intended to ensure the provider understands what they are supposed to deliver, the customer knows what to expect, and both can see (empirically) what is actually being delivered.

Regrettably, the ‘agreement’ role of the SLA is lost in many organisations, where SLA’s are used as ‘weapons’ to defend or challenge the provider or customer. The emphasis for SLAs must be on agreement, and the SLA should not be used to hold either side to ransom. A true partnership should be developed between the IT service provider and the customer, enabling a collaborative approach to quality improvement.

Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are a core element of an SLA. Ineffective or absent KPI can cause a service to fall into disrepute and a blame culture can develop. KPI for the service must accurately reflect the expectations and perceptions of both the customer and service provider.

To manage service provision, we need:

• Service metrics which reflect the end-to-end quality of service or ‘user experience’
• Process metrics to inform the service provider and customer of the effectiveness (achieving goals) and efficiency (use of resources) of key activities within the service delivery function.
• Technology metrics to inform the IT provider at the component level, enabling the identification of issues and improvement opportunities

When considering SLA KPI we must recognise that Customer perceptions are influenced by:

• Attributes of service that are indicators of value e.g. relative performance, reliability or security of a remote workspace service
• Present or prior experience of similar attributes
• Relative endowment of competitors and other peers i.e. what they have
• Customers self image or actual position in market (innovator, market leader, risk taker) i.e. do I expect leading edge solutions or accept / expect robust security requirements to access the service

When considering KPI from an IT perspective, we need to recognise that the customer is not excessively concerned with how the provider delivers the service and, as such, is NOT interested in visibility of the majority of KPI which the IT provider uses to manage the service e.g. component performance. On this basis, component and process KPI should not be included in the SLA. They are primarily articulated in Operational Level Agreements and Underpinning Contracts which underpin the SLA. Obviously, certain process KPI will overlap with customer expectations for the service e.g. “95% of incident which impacts more than 50 people in the organisation will be resolved within 4 hours” – customer expectation and Incident Management effectiveness KPI.

We also needs to consider the inclusion of Objective KPI (number of major incidents in a month) and Subjective KPI (Improvements in customer satisfaction).

Finally, we need to consider any scope or constraint measurements that may be required to provide context for current service levels. For example, incident resolution targets or service performance targets may be defined in the context of the number of user of the services (up to 500 concurrent users). In this case, we need to have visibility of the number of concurrent users at any time. It’s a possible discussion for another day but it is imperative that we always consider how we are going to measure each aspect of the service, before including it in the SLA. The mechanism, source and frequency of data collection, processing, analysis and reporting should be mutually agreed between the customer and IT service provider.

So, in summary:

You cannot have an SLA without measurements (KPI)

When selecting KPI, ask, what indicates value to the customer?

• Enhanced performance in the business
• Constraints removed from the business
• Availability & Reliability of the Service
• Performance of the service o Security of the service o Service Continuity (ability to recover from disaster)

Do not include IT ‘management’ KPI i.e. component & process metrics only used by IT. 

• Consider “How and how often, can I measure that?”
• Consider Objectives and Subjective metrics

Remember scope measures that may be required for context.

Above all else, do not forget the #1 rule – Nothing should be included in an SLA unless it can be effectively monitored and measured at commonly agreed points.

What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
How to Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Problem Management KPIs – kpi itil

Problem Management KPIs – kpi itil

In this post, you can ref free useful materials about kpi itil and other materials for kpi itil such as kpi tips, kpi mistakes, kpi examples, kpi templates, kpi dashboard, kpi form, how to create kpi/performance metrics

If you need free ebook:

• List of free 2436 KPIs

• Top 28 performance appraisal forms

• 11 performance appraisal methods

• 1125 performance review phrases

please visit: kpi123.com

KPI guides

Measuring effectiveness of the problem management process can be a challenging task at times. This is because you often do not have enough data if your other processes are not mature enough. Also, expectations of senior management can push you to the limits of your analytical skills. For example, what would you do if you had to provide the "number of incidents prevented last month due to problems solved"? I am sure you see my point.


Here are the problem management performance indicators, which I find useful:

• number of problems registered,
• number of problems solved,
• number and percentage of problems with root cause identified,
• number and percentage of problems with workaround available,
• average age of a problem, per business impact,
• percentage of incidents related to (caused by) problems in relation to all incidents in a particular time period,
• update frequency of open problems.

Update frequency is the KPI I like a lot, especially in the early stages of Problem Management implementation. It shows the regularity of work performed by Problem Analysts. In order for the process to be effective, work on it must not be put away forever. It tends to happen if you have your people doing other, more time-pressing activities in parallel. Many businesses cannot afford the luxury of having dedicated Problem Analysts and/or Problem Managers. Since Problem Management puts more focus on quality of analysis than the time of its completion, you might have issues with people focusing on the job if you don't have a KPI to monitor it.

The above KPIs should be looked at collectively to determine the quality of your Problem Management activities. You should be concerned if you open few problems the way the police should be concerned if they detect few crimes. They are there, the question is if you can detect them or not. You should also react if any other KPI starts deviate significantly towards its highs or lows. Frequently, if that happens, you can get an idea of what is going on by looking at the other KPIs. Few problems solved? Check your problem update frequency, for example.

Tip for improving all those KPIs: work closely with your Service Desk. After all, they feed you data. Good incident registration process is key for subsequent  root-cause analysis.

What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
How to Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

List of kpi’s for change management processper itil – kpi itil

List of kpi’s for change management processper itil – kpi itil

In this post, you can ref free useful materials about kpi itil and other materials for kpi itil such as kpi tips, kpi mistakes, kpi examples, kpi templates, kpi dashboard, kpi form, how to create kpi/performance metrics

If you need free ebook:

• List of free 2436 KPIs

• Top 28 performance appraisal forms

• 11 performance appraisal methods

• 1125 performance review phrases

please visit: kpi123.com

KPI guides

Change management is the important and integral part of service transitioning not that it helps the services to come alive, but also plays an important part in the upgrades and restoration.
I know what you are thinking restoration of service is Incident Management, but one should keep this in mind that Incident management and Change management is also connecting to each other. Later we Shall look more into this while discussing the KPI’s.
 Some of the Key areas of determining the process and service value per change management, by the means of KPI’s are as follows :
 Number of successful Changes performed in a particular time frame (Month/Quarter/ Half Yearly)
This will give you a clear output of work value that has been delivered to the client. However there are other factors which are required to look in for attaining this with high ratio.
 Number of changes failed due to unforeseen or technical difficulties.  
These are required to be minimal but often we have observed that even after doing the successful test run at the time of performing the change it gets failed.
This could be because of any hardware of software glitches.
While performing a critical change minute mistake such reading the disc allocation space would result in disaster , this are pure human error at engineering level.
While performing the change logged into the test server instead of Production machine…
Such instances are rare but not completely ignored while gauging the process and assessment of delivery.
 Number of Emergency Changes performed due to or without Incident.
ECR request help in understanding the service flaws and need for improvement in services be it hardware upgrade/ script maintenance/Incident reporting /lead time issue that could have caused this ECR.
 Number of Changes performed and completed successfully within the SLA
This gives you a clear idea of how SLA is being met at all level irrespective of priority of CR submitted.
 Number of changes followed the lead time process correctly.
Lead time process and its adherence is important in the lifecycle of a CR any request failing this could easily be rejected or denied.  This will cause further delay in service improvement.

Number of changes failed to approve due to some XYZ reason.
This factor will give insight into the approval process and would focus on checking if there is an improvement required to map the process more efficiently to improve the communication and notification among the service provider and customer.
 Number of changes rejected during the lifecycle of a CR
Changes rejected due to failure of test results, Impact critical services, not following proper lead time, insufficient impact summary and details…etc
 Number of high priority changes performed or high impact CR’s
This will give a clear value and understanding of ability to deliver and carter critical services at any given point of time. However this should have high success rate.
 Changes performed during the business hours
There are certain changes which can only be performed during the business hours, due to non availability of different teams and the criticality of the CR’s being minimal and none impacting. Example is change raised to unrack the decommissioned a router as pick and delivery can only be feasible during the business hours.
 Changes causing any service interruption during business hours.
There are certain go live projects which would require live users testing and analysis and thus required to be conducted during business hours as service provider one should not overlook this point. It could be rare but not illusive.

What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
How to Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)