Service Catalogs and Service Level Agreements

The first step in creating Service Level Agreements (SLA) or Service Level Objectives (SLO) is to create a service catalog. At its most basic level, a service catalog is a list of all the services your help desk will provide. In most cases, an SLA is used to define the support requirements of a team to which the help desk escalates cases.

The helpdesk may have internal goals for first call resolution, average speed of answer, and so forth, but PC repairs and debugging application issues often fall into a black hole when they are assigned outside of the help desk. It is these escalated cases as well as the issuing of new user IDs, PCs, and software, that will benefit the most from defined SLAs or SLOs.

Creating a service catalog to begin defining your service levels is always easiest where you have a help desk case management system and good data to measure. If you have already divided your cases into meaningful categories and/or subcategories, you can start by reporting on the categories that have the highest volume of cases in a given month. This will vary from company to company.

After you have listed your categories from highest volume to lowest, review the list and think through the value of a defined SLA or SLO for each. If it doesn't make sense, also determine if your category is appropriate. You may need to look at more detailed information or redefine your categories to make them more or less descriptive.

With your list of case categories that should have defined service levels, report on the actual performance against those service levels. You may find that installing software takes one day to turn around, but creating new user IDs takes three. You may find that deploying a new laptop or mobile device takes two weeks when you thought it was only taking a few days.

Now that you have a basic service catalog and a baseline of performance metrics, you are ready to begin the process of defining service level agreements with your support teams. Implementing SLAs is outside the scope of this article, because it is an intricate process that requires working through management and people issues that may lie outside of customary organizational boundaries.

Get started now on your service catalog, since it is your first step to achieving SLAs. It makes escalated support performance objective and helps put you in control of case management.