Question 6

Question

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

Accepted Answer

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.

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