"How do I manage Service Level Agreements (SLAs)?" Find out in this episode of Appfire Presents: The Best IT Service Management Show by Appfire. Appfire's Onder Ozcan joins Kerry O'Shea Gorgone to talk about ITSM SLAs: what they are, who they're for, and managing SLAs in Jira Service Management and Jira Software.
About the guest
Onder Ozcan is Senior Product Manager ITSM at Appfire. He's been in IT for twenty years and is an Atlassian Certified Jira Administrator.
About the show
The BEST ITSM Show by Appfire brings you expert insights for IT service delivery, so your employees and customers have what they need to succeed. Get the right tech and tips for the right job at hand. Look like you’ve come from the future with all your new ITSM smarts. Every episode is a brisk 10 minutes—less time than it takes to provision a laptop or troubleshoot a tech support issue.
For your convenience, here is the transcript of this episode:
How do I manage Service Level Agreements (SLAs)?
Kerry: On today’s episode we’re going to talk about how to manage service level agreements. Onder Ozcan is senior product manager ITSM at Appfire. He’s been in IT for 20 years, he’s an Atlassian certified Jira administrator, he is the perfect person to talk to us about SLAs. Stick around for 10 minutes of valuable advice.
Onder, thanks for joining. The big question is how do I manage service level agreements, or SLAs, but I think the precursor is what even are those?
Onder: Hi, Kerry. That’s a great question. Actually, in the ITSM world we have an amazing guideline called ITIL. Based on ITIL, an SLA is a written document between service provider and a customer to identify both the services required and the expected level of service. In other words, SLAs are the tools to measure the performance of your services from the customer’s point of view. I must stress that this is the key of it, the customer’s point of view.
To put it into context, let me give you an example. Picture this. We are working for an internet service provider, and as a customer when I sign up an internet package, internet service, we as a provider have to make sure that we are providing certain download speed, upload speed, the maximum allowed download size, the uptime, based on a 24/7 basis.
This is an SLA. As you can see, it is more than just a document. It’s your promises to your customers. In that regard, if you want to create customer delight and to deliver exceptional services, you might need to invest into SLA management.
Kerry: In the example you gave, the customer is external. Are all customers external when you’re talking about service level agreements?
Onder: Again, it’s a very good question. Customers can be internal as well as external. Especially after the pandemic, your employees become the first-class customers. In actual fact, based on Gartner’s recent studies, 56% of employees are demanding consumer grade experience from their workplaces. I have to tell you that it’s a real challenge and it is exerting significant pressure to any modern IT organization, including IT support teams, dev ops teams, the system network teams, all of them.
Kerry: What’s an example of an SLA for employees, what kinds of things go in?
Onder: Off the top of my head, I can think of requesting a new hardware. For example, a new laptop. Imagine we are working for an IT support team, so by defining the SLA we can make sure that whenever a new laptop request in we need to respond in two business days, which is known as the time to respond SLA within the ITSM jargon. For example, you have to complete this request within five business days, which effectively means time to resolution SLA.
Kerry: Okay. So, it’s an actual SLA just like you would have for an external customer.
Onder: Yes.
Kerry: Let’s talk about how to actually manage these. We’ve talked about a couple of different contexts in which you need them. How do you actually manage them? A lot of people in the space use Jira Service Management, so I guess let’s start there.
Onder: In Jira Service Management, you can manage your SLAs by a wonderful application called Time to SLA from, not surprisingly, Appfire.
Kerry: What? We make apps?
Onder: It’s not a surprise, I suppose. It’s a great application, it’s a great product, it really is. You can easily create your SLAs. You can create them, you can manage them, you can report on those SLAs. You can define numerous SLAs based on your own organizational needs. Also, it is available on all Atlassian platforms. If you are a Cloud customer, if you are a data center customer, or a server customer, it doesn’t matter. Time to SLA can work within all the deployment types.
Kerry: So, it works for Jira software, too?
Onder: Actually, it is working on Jira software as well. Let me give you a bit of context. Normally, in any given organization, different teams utilize different tool stacks. For example, when it comes to a new employee onboarding or offboarding, your HR team can utilize the JSM.
On the other hand, for creating a new email account for the ops teams, they can utilize Jira software. In order to cover this HR onboarding process, you need to have Time to SLA so that you can cover both JSM and Jira software as well. SLAs are not for just JSM. You can define your SLAs for software teams and for development teams as well.
Kerry: Oh, good. Do you have to have an app, or is there any functionality for SLAs baked in?
Onder: Again, a great question. I have to tell you that JSM (Jira Service Management) is a great tool. It comes with built in templates and many functionalities, including SLAs, but it is only available on Jira Service Management. If you need an application, it’s a capability that is available on Jira software, then Time to SLA is the solution.
Not only that, I have to tell you that the built in JSM SLAs in terms of the capabilities, it is somehow limited. For example, if you need to be able to create a next business day SLA for your VIP customers, or you’re sending a Slack notification for a designated group of people, or to be able to apply your SLA configurations to existing issues by using complex JQL queries, then Time to SLA is the answer.
Kerry: That all sounds very involved to me. I feel like I would definitely want a tool for that, but that’s just me.
Onder: Why don’t you check it out at Appfire.com?
Kerry: I think I will. Thank you, Onder. This has been fun. This is The Best ITSM Show by Appfire. You can find more episodes at Hub.Appfire.com. If you do want to check out Time to SLA or any of our other apps, they are at Appfire.com. Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you next time.