Service Level Agreements are usually set up to agree with your customer (internal and external) the actual process for controlling the quality of a delivered service in order to consistently meet their requirements. Once you have SLA's in place you can then manage the agreement and ensure that you deliver what you agreed with your customer.

Example: We agree with a customer that we will respond to a call within two hours of that call being logged. This can be the "Gold" standard. It could be that many customers do not wish to pay for this level of service and would be happy with a four hour response time. This could be called "Silver" standard. And so it goes on. Another way of setting up SLA's could be on the severity of the call. Again if a system is down the severity could be "Critical" and the response time for this would be 1 hour- If people could still log on and work but couldn't email, for instance, it could be "Major" and response time could be 2 hours. Again it is good practice to have a number of options depending upon the customer and what they are willing to pay and the severity of the incident. One word of warning, if you are going to give SLA's to your customers, you need a way of alerting the management that an SLA is about to be breached. The HEAT Managers Console gives you a "desk top" view of what is happening in real time.

• Click here for more information on the Managers Console
• Powerpoint Presentation - SLAs and how to make them work for you