Tag: Service Level Agreements

SLAs Constrain Improving Productivity | Blog

Three years ago, I wrote some blogs stating that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are dead. Unfortunately for businesses, SLAs are still around – they’re like zombies. Companies realized for many years that SLAs don’t work. They are not just ineffective; they constrain companies from getting to their goals for services. But, like zombies, they did not die. Why? Because there was nothing better to use in governing service agreements. Until now. In this blog, I will explain what works better than SLAs, and why.

In digital service models, companies need to move to a new set of metrics. Metrics that focus on productivity. Metrics that focus on velocity. Fluid metrics that allow companies to adjust the target to a changing reality. Metrics that accurately affect pricing. Metrics that do not lock companies into old contractual vehicles that no longer work.

Read more in my blog on Forbes

Why Service Level Agreements are Dead | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Service-level agreement (SLA) contracts can drive the wrong business outcomes. Some technology leaders want to move away from those SLA-driven contracts.

If you’re like many CIOs, the chances are your company compensates third-party IT service providers for something they didn’t do or pays them twice for something. Technology leader Nipa Chakravarti realized that’s what was happening at TransAlta (Canada’s largest publicly traded power generator and provider of renewable energy). I recently talked with Nipa, and she made an interesting comment: “I want to move away from SLA-driven contracts.”

As Nipa explained in a prior blog post, she successfully restructured TransAlta’s IT group to be more responsive to business needs, doing the things that the business users care about and doing them in a reasonable time frame and cost point. As detailed in that blog, she dramatically changed the value equation for IT at the company, making it much more cost-effective, achieving results much faster and at the same time delivering higher quality and more reliable work. That’s quite a formidable set of accomplishments. So it’s worth paying attention to her strategies for taking the organization to the next level.

Read more at CIO online.

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