Scenario
A company provides an internet-based gift delivery service which is highly dependent upon IT services provided by the internal IT organization. A year ago the customer payments service that supports the gift ordering website regularly experienced poor availability. The organization hired a service management consultant to assess why the IT services were performing poorly and to rectify the situation.
As part of the solution, the consultant implemented service level management and adopted the role of interim service level manager. Service level agreements were negotiated with the business and agreed. The necessary underpinning agreements were negotiated and put in place. Regular monitoring and reporting was implemented. Monthly service review meetings with the business unit managers were established to discuss IT service performance and any issues and improvements. Within a year of the start of the initiative the gift ordering website IT service was performing at 98.7% availability, a significant improvement.
This month's service review meeting was attended by the chief executive officer (CEO) after concerns were expressed about the most recent availability figure for the customer payments service, which was 94%. This covered the period which included one of the traditionally most popular gift ordering times. The consultant stated that the poor availability was almost entirely due to an incident that occurred during one of the busiest periods and. as a result, the overall monthly availability percentage was low. Initial investigation has shown that the service desk used the SLA to designate the incident as a 'Priority 2'. This was however lower than the 'Priority 1" the business believed the incident should have been. The subsequent delay in restoration of the service meant some customer orders were lost.
The CEO reminded the consultant that a repeat of such an incident would not only have a major effect on monthly revenues but also seriously affect the company's reputation. The consultant agreed that this was unacceptable and committed to review this issue and report back to the CEO.
Refer to Scenario

• A. The SLM should agree with the business managers to set up a service improvement plan (SIP) to address the issue. Differing views relating to the cause of the low availability mean it should be investigated thoroughly to establish whether the slow restoration of service was due to a lack of understanding by the service desk, incorrect service level targets in the SLA or simply that, owing to the type of failure, restoration was always going to take that length of time. Appropriate action can then be taken to rectify the issue.
• B. The issue is with the service desk and its incorrect interpretation of the SLA and failure to escalate the issues. The SLM should agree to set up a SIP for the service desk. The operational level agreement (OLA) with the service desk should be reviewed to ensure that it underpins the SLAs. The SIP should include the retraining of the service desk staff. A complete review of the service desk tools should ensure that they can be used to prioritize incidents correctly by passing through targets agreed into the priority matrix of the toolset.
• C. The SLM should conduct an investigation by reviewing incidents and problems. Ask the IT service desk and support staff what ideas they have to resolve the issue. Review the impact on all other SLAs. OLAs contracts and procedures. Review the maturity associated with the service level management process and take steps to improve this process if necessary. Create a SIP with an associated business case for presentation to the chief executive officer (CEO).
• D. The issue is clearly a breakdown in understanding regarding the critical business periods and the matching of these to the availability targets in the SLAs. The SLM should agree with the business managers to set up a SIP to investigate the issue. The SLAs should be reviewed with the business to ensure that they match with the business needs and, if necessary are updated. Review and update any underpinning agreements as necessary to ensure that they support the targets in the SLAs.

Scenario
A large, privately owned company has an internal IT organization that runs most of its IT operations from the head office. There has been a history of confusion about what is required from the services and what has actually been achieved, particularly from a warranty perspective. This has resulted in a strained relationship between the business units and the IT organization.
Some service-based agreements exist between IT and the customers, where all levels of response to incidents were set to the same targets. Availability targets have not been reviewed for at least two years. There have been a number of complaints by key customers claiming that the IT staff have been resolving incidents and implementing change requests based on operational ease rather than business priority. This is despite operationally robust processes being in place for incident, change and problem management.
A plan has been put in place to improve the level of the IT service delivered to the organization.
Retirement of the post-holder meant that the first action was to appoint a new IT director. The opportunity was taken to select a candidate from an external organization, who was committed to the ITIL framework. The new IT director believes that good IT service management practices are essential.
The IT director plans to implement many of the service management processes and has already overseen the creation of a basic service catalogue. The IT director is sure that many of the current issues can be rectified through the implementation of service level management (SLM) and has therefore directed that service level agreements (SLA) be introduced for the services provided before moving onto other areas. You have been asked to lead the project to establish SLAs for the IT services.
Refer to the Scenario.
Which one of the following sequence of activities would be the BEST approach to establishing service levels agreements (SLA) in the organization?

• A. Identify all the services currently delivered using the service catalogue.
  Define a primarily service-based approach to implementing service level agreements.
  Using the service templates already in use, meet with the appropriate customer representatives and, after discussion, produce formal SLRs which document the levels of service that the customer needs.
  Arrange meetings with the appropriate IT teams, specifically those involved in incident, availability and capacity management, to discuss, document and communicate the levels of service required.
  From these discussions operational level agreements (OLAs) are then produced.
  The SLRs and OLAs can be formally monitored, reported upon and reviewed at the agreed intervals.
• B. Identify all of the services currently delivered using the service catalogue.
  Define a primarily customer-based approach to implementing service levels agreements (SLAs).
  Using a pre-prepared pro-forma service level requirements (SLR) template, meet with the appropriate customer representatives to discuss and document their service level requirements.
  Arrange meetings with the appropriate IT teams, specifically those involved in incident, availability and capacity management, to discuss, document and agree the levels of service required.
  Draft agreements from these discussions are then reviewed by service operations to ensure that no existing agreements will be compromised and, once this has been confirmed, the SLA is formally reviewed, agreed, and signed by both the customer and IT.
  The service level targets are then formally communicated, monitored, reported upon and reviewed at the agreed intervals.
• C. Meet with the IT operations team, specifically, those involved in incident, availability and capacity management, to define what level of service they can offer to the business against each service in the service catalogue.
  Meet with the appropriate customer representatives to give them a clear understanding of the levels of service IT can offer.
  Produce and agree an SLA and ensure it is signed by representatives of both parties.
  Document and agree OLAs with the service operation teams.
  Ensure all parties understand their responsibilities and enforce penalties for non-compliance.
  Once both agreements have been signed, all service level targets are then formally monitored and reviewed.
• D. Identify all of the services currently delivered using the service catalogue.
  Define a primarily service-based approach to implementing service level agreements.
  Meet with the appropriate business representatives and, after discussion, produce a formal SLA that guarantees the levels of service that the business needs.
  Arrange meetings with the appropriate IT teams, specifically those involved in incident, availability and capacity management, to inform them of the service levels you have agreed Document and agree OLAs with the service operation teams.
  Once these are agreed and signed the OLAs are passed back to the business to demonstrate that IT will support the SLA and to build upon the trust between the two parties.