Hello,

I have been tasked with generating an SLA for our customer base (1700 users, 110 sites Windows clients and servers, Office and propriatery software) and I have no idea where to start. Are there any SLA guru's on here?

R

An SLA for what? what you measuring? as a general rule of thumb you want the lowest figure your customer will agree to and watch out for the financial penalities they may try and put in place. Also think about how they can be accurately measured and verified and who will do this work going forward, yes a system might give you the raw data but then transferring this data in to a customer facing and meaningful; report takes time and resources.

Ours use "Response" and "Fix" times , and then anything from 2 to 8 hours with cover varying from monday to friday 9-5.30 , right up to 24-7 including bank holidays.

Response times are from the point at which the call is logged to someone arriving on site , and fix times are equally self explanatory. The start time is when we have been supplied with all the necessary information to deal with the call correctly.

We deal mostly in networking equipment which is generally easier to fix , but we would require as a minimum , site details including a contact who we can actually get hold of , make and model of the affected equipment and software levels and cofiguration. If they can't supply us all of the above then we don't start the SLA clock until we get it. As an example it recently took us a day and a half to arrange access to a site that was on a 4 hour response , but the time started when we eventually got the bloke to phone us back.

In your case I'd look at what is a realistic length of time to be able to get to these sites (including time for engineers to get to your office first if you do out of hours cover), plus any telephone diagnostics time that you require and use that as a basis for an SLA to actually attend site. Oh , and round up to be on the safe side.

For simple hardware faults you can offer a guaranteed fix time as you know that it should only take so long to swap a blown PSU after arrival but exclude reinstallation of software if a hard drive is totalled.

For software faults and similar problems don't attempt to offer a guaranteed fix time as it's impossible to predict how long they will take to resolve especially if you have to seek outside assistance. Stick with a response time if at all possible.

Hello' date='

I have been tasked with generating an SLA for our customer base (1700 users, 110 sites Windows clients and servers, Office and propriatery software) and I have no idea where to start. Are there any SLA guru's on here?

R[/quote']

unlucky!

if you're not in a hurry i'll try and find some templates from work and mail them over to you...ric

That would be superb, thank you very much.... I have got some work done on it in the last week, but a squint at a template would be good.

[email protected]

Rob....