Keeping track of your projects, tasks, and timelines can be a huge lift. But setting up SLAs — and managing them effectively — can help your team stay on track and on time.

What are SLAs, and why are they important?

A service-level agreement (SLA) is an agreement between a provider of services and the customer. “Customer” in this context can refer to an internal employee or team that’s providing services to the rest of the organization or an external customer who pays for goods or services.

An SLA outlines the client's expectations, the services you’ll provide, and the metrics used to evaluate performance. With an SLA, you can set up and manage clear expectations relating to projects and tasks, timelines, and deliverables.

Project admins often set up SLAs in Jira Service Management (JSM) because timely request fulfillment is essential to client retention and satisfaction. This translates into teams being able to monitor their turnaround times and measure how often they're delivering quality service.

So, for example, project admins set up SLA targets that outline the requests they want to monitor and their estimated resolution time. They specify the dates and conditions that might affect the SLA measurements, like the start date, any pauses in work, and finish times.

Setting up SLAs pays off because they increase client retention and satisfaction. SLAs in JSM also help to increase efficiency within IT teams and improve transparency and accountability. Used properly, service-level agreements help formalize, structure, and promote communication and strengthen your team’s relationship with customers.

But there are some challenges you might face when implementing SLAs (especially the first time). Some teams have a hard time adjusting to strict SLAs or notice less flexibility in submitting reports. So, before starting: consider your metrics, define the scope of the agreement, establish what KPI will be assessed and ensure to include all relevant parties. Remember that SLAs shouldn’t be set unless they can be measured and monitored accurately.

Another issue that may rise: Many service desks don’t offer compatibility or flexibility for reporting, setting up, monitoring, or adjusting SLAs.

However, configuring a new SLA in Jira Service Management (JSM) doesn’t have to be complicated. You can do it in minutes. More to come on that!

Understanding JSM and its role within SLAs

JSM stands for Jira Service Management, and it’s Atlassian’s service management solution built on Jira. You can use JSM to help empower teams and accelerate work by offering more visibility, and increasing the flow of work between the business, IT, and development teams.

In JSM, you can easily add smart forms to customer service portals and requests, integrate with your favorite apps, and build custom add-ons. It’s a powerful solution for everything ITSM-related. Why is it especially useful in terms of SLAs?

For many ITSM service desks and platforms, you have to create custom service-level agreements or hard-code SLAs into other products and solutions. And changing them can require days of development work. But in JSM, you can easily create SLAs that reflect the way your team works.

How to create an SLA in JSM?

Firstly (and most importantly), you must be a Jira administrator or project admin. Then, you can proceed.

If you need more detail, we’ve got you covered with in-depth instructions for creating SLAs.

How to set up and manage SLAs with Time to SLA?

Another way to quickly and easily manage your SLAs is with the help of a solution designed to manage them. Time to SLA enables you to easily define, track, report, and manage SLAs. A customized panel that changes color based on the SLA status enables you to keep your team’s work on track. And you won’t need to worry about missing a deadline because Time to SLA can create an event and send you email and Slack notifications to keep you on schedule.

To set up a service-level agreement in Time to SLA, start by defining permissions within your team. You can configure users in the Permissions menu. Then head to the Calendars menu, where you can set up a customized calendar for each team.

Important: Remember to set the right time zone in Settings.

If you’d like more details, check out these step-by-step instructions for defining your first SLA.

5 best practices for maintaining SLA compliance

Here are some best practices for setting up your SLAs.

1. Make sure your goals are realistic and achievable.
SLAs are an agreement you need to uphold. Include as many details as possible to avoid any unclear situations. And be sure to include key metrics.

2. Create an SLA that pauses monitoring time to resolution while you're waiting for a response from the customer.
You can easily run into trouble assessing SLAs if you encounter slow-responding clients and third-party escalations. Make sure to account for exceptions in your measurement and reporting systems.

3. Avoid large, complex SLAs.
Use several smaller SLAs instead of one large one so you can analyze and report on the specific components of your process rather than having to dig around in a huge report. Splitting things up will also make it easier to maintain and update your SLAs.

4. Set unique performance targets depending on the priority of your tickets.
When assigning ticket priority, consider who opened the ticket and how it will affect different areas of the company. To set SLA performance targets that suit your specific needs, choose flexible service desk software. You want to be able to adjust priorities so your team stays focused on the work that matters most.

5. Vary and adjust your SLA running times.
Your service desk team can't provide round-the-clock support if they only operate Monday to Friday during regular business hours. Consider adjusting your service desk schedule to include weekends and holidays as needed. You can also create calendars to support teams in different time zones.

To summarize

SLAs take some planning to implement, but the benefits they offer — like clear agreements on expectations, tasks, timelines, and deliverables — as well as the options to manage those expectations, makes SLAs a must-have for project admins. And using Time to SLA, you can create SLAs easily and start tracking, reporting, and managing work more effectively.

Create clear SLAs within Jira Service Management and Jira Software

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