ITIL Topic covered
Service Level Management
For the majority of SME’s, the main IT suppliers may be faceless organisations whose main method of contact is via a website or if you are really lucky a call centre. Just because the supplier does not provide you with a personable account manager, does not discount the fact that you should avoid carrying out a regular service review.
Going back to the principles of good service management, the key objectives are to maintain or improve system uptime, to reduce costs and to drive better value for the companies IT services.
Taking these principles as our guiding light, we can still carryout a service review for our faceless suppliers.
How ?
Well let’s take a few typical suppliers:
1) Voice and Data Telephony supplier
2) Web Hosting Service
3) Main Hardware Procurement Source
What do they all have in common?
Well firstly they provide a service, probably one that can be measured and hopefully with a level service availability. This may not be clearly quoted in your contract documentation or may be implied but with a bit of pushing your supplier may provide a “target” figure
Secondly, they will carry a cost of service and one that could be compared with other like for like suppliers.
Finally a soft measurement of customer service could be established based upon you engagements with them.
So now we have a couple of points of focus but how do we use this information to carryout a service review? Well the first thing that needs to be decided is how often to carryout the review. This may be driven by a renewal date, a regular cycle (eg every 3 months) or may be triggered by an outage or bad customer service experience. Either way, the trigger for the service review needs to be established.
Once you decided to have the review, get any support documents or contracts out and look for information relating to service metrics. You are looking for measurements, service charters, targets, in fact anything which can be measured. If nothing exists, contact your supplier and ask them what their service metrics are (eg if I lost voice capability, how quickly after placing a call should I expect an engineer and then following that how quickly should I get it fixed). Also ask them where they publish their results or if they don’t how you are able to access them.
Next, it would be worth while digging out any commercial documents Get a feel for the cost of the service you are paying for and if possible get a few like for like quotes from other companies. Don’t forget to factor in any exit costs and the cost of moving supplier including any costs in terms of time etc.
Finally write down your thoughts regarding how you feel about your supplier. A good way to do this is to create two simple lists titled “Highs” and “Lows”. Record any good points under the Highs and any bad points under the Lows.
In the next chapter of this subject, we will focus on how to actually carry out the service review.
