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Guidelines for Establishing an SLA
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) defines the responsibilities of both the IT service provider and the users. Typically, an SLA will include the following:

1. Definition of the service provided, the parties involved and the effective dates of the agreement.

2. Specifications of the hours and days during which the service will be offered, including testing, maintenance and upgrades.

3. Specifications of the numbers and/or locations of users and/or hardware for which the service will be offered.

4. Explanation of problem-reporting procedures, including conditions of escalation to the next level of support. The explanation should include a definition of expected response time to a problem report.

5. Explanation of change-request procedures. This portion may include expected times for completing routine change requests.

6. Specifications of target levels of service quality, including:

· average availability, expressed as the average number of failures per service period and lowest availability;

· average response time and lowest response time;

· average throughput; and

· explanations of how these metrics are calculated and how frequently they are reported.

7. Specifications of charges associated with the service. May be flat rate or may be tied to different levels of service quality.

8. Specifications of user responsibilities under the SLA (user training, maintaining proper desktop configuration, not introducing extraneous software or circumventing change management procedures).

9. Description of procedures for resolving service-related disagreements.

10. Process for amending the SLA.

Ideally, SLAs are defined as a particular service is being set up. This allows the hardware and software configurations to be designed to maximize the ability to meet the SLA.

--Provided by Northeast Consulting Resources