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Anyone who has provided services or paid for services probably already knows the high-level reason here.

In simple terms, milestones get missed, quality isn’t always at high standards, requirements get changed, etc etc.

One of these problems will appear in any project or service provision at some point in time. The purpose of a service-level agreement is to overcome these problems as best you can.

By defining the requirements, everyone knows what the scope of work is, it can’t be changed last minute, and the service provider can more easily meet the targets – targets are hard to meet if you don’t know what they are.

In a former life, I managed service provision for a small IT company. We did software builds, ongoing maintenance, and managed services. Some contracts would span all three, others only one.

As we were a small company, I pretty much ran operations. I ran the sales, support, and all other client-facing work.

I hated it.

I liked the company and my colleagues, but dealing with clients and things going wrong was hell. It wasn’t necessarily the clients’ fault, even if some were difficult. Looking back, it was kind of my fault.

You see, my processes weren’t strong enough. The agreements I drew up with clients were often too one-sided in the client’s favor, lacked sufficient clarity, and weren’t living documents.

Moreover, those documents didn’t really have much bearing on the actual work itself. The agreements weren’t built-in to our processes. They were adjacent – maybe.

Read more: SLA engineering

And these same organizational issues were present across the company, unfortunately. It meant that clients were often left dissatisfied and contracts not renewed.

2020-05-06 13:54:08, views: 557, Comments: 0