The first step in creating a Help Desk Service Level Agreements (SLA) is to create a Service Catalog. At the most basic level, a service catalog provides a list of all services a help desk offers. It markets an authorized service portfolio or its subset and consists of one or more descriptions of current service offerings and, optionally, future capabilities. Two additional definitions are also common in an industrial practice:
- The subset of the service portfolio that is visible to customers consisting of services currently active in the operation phase. These services must be approved to be readily offered to current and prospective customers.
- A database or structured document with information about all provided IT services published to customers, including development, deployment, support, maintenance, and others.
Prerequisites and Steps for Service Catalog
There are a few steps required to create a service catalog. When a well-established help desk system exists in an organization, the first step is almost accomplished. Help desk issues and cases are usually divided into meaningful categories and/or subcategories using a support ticket categorization and classification. The next step is to analyze reports on categories that have the highest volume of cases in a given month. This will reveal what kinds of issues are the most common in the help desk, pointing to the best candidates for the registry.
After the categories are listed from highest volume to lowest, the list should be reviewed in a way to define a single agreement for each category. If it doesn’t make sense, the category should be analyzed further and examined to determine whether it is well defined. You may need to look at more detailed information or redefine categories to make them more or less detailed.
With the list of case categories that should have defined service levels, the next step is to report on the actual performance against defined services. For example, you may find that software installation takes one day to complete, but creating user login form takes three. You may find that deploying a new laptop or mobile device takes a week, when you thought it was only taking a few days. The categories could also point to individual software maintenance topics, if the service team is primarily oriented toward the related services.
Defining a Service Level Agreement
Now when a basic service catalog and a baseline set of performance metrics are established, you are ready to begin with the process of defining a service level agreement. In most cases, the SLA defines the response requirements of a team to which the help desk escalates cases.
The help desk usually has strong and well-defined internal goals for first-call resolution, improved average speed of answer, etc. However, there are services that often fall into a black hole, since they are usually assigned outside of the help desk. For example, debugging software issues, the deployment of computers and software packages, support to clients delivered by phone, and more. These types of cases will benefit the most from defined SLAs.
The adoption and negotiation of SLA with clients is outside the scope of this article, because it is a complex process that requires working through management and people issues. However, there’s nothing stopping you from getting started with service catalog, as a first step toward achieving SLA. Eventually, you’ll establish support performance objectives and put in control of your case management.
