SLA vs. Service

What is the difference between a Service Level Agreement and a working relationship?
One will give you good support, the other guarantees you mediocre support. Guess to care which one makes you happy? Hint: it's not the legal document..


There is absolutely no doubt that any support agreement should be accompanied by (many) a legal document, but this document should be the foundation on which a true working relationship is built.


I want my Google!
A couple of weeks ago I was at a client when all of a sudden ALL thin clients were unable to connect to the internet. No problem, we'll have an early lunch and go on our merry way. But alas, still no Wikipedia goodness. Since I was there together with another Hippo to work in the CMS, we kind of needed access. Time to make a call to the "service" desk, to ask whether or not we should head back home.

On an unrelated note

After listening to the default tape telling me that currently there is a problem with Citrix. I quickly got hold of an understandably harried person. In response to my question "any idea how long it will take", he immediately replied with "well, we have made a top-prio issue, so within 4 hours". While true it's not very useful, it means that I might waste an entire man-day playing minesweeper.


The personal relationship
The human element is often under-examined in "proper" support systems such as ITIL. If you have a problem, then you want to talk to someone you trust; not a automaton that tells you that your problem will be looked at within the required X hours.

Reminds me of the famous Afghan war strategy

As Berry Schwartz said: "when things go wrong -as of course they do- (...) one tool we reach for is rules: better ones, more of them". ITIL embodies 30+ years of rule-making to prevent disaster. Unfortunately rules don't allow for exceptions, they regulate that ALL top-prio incidents should be handled within four hours. So the tools are there to handle ALL issues in four hours, even if these same tools (rules) prevent you from fixing things in a couple of minutes.

Understandable
Unlike Hendrik Hijzen, our super cool and awesome* Service Manager I am not without blame here. With my CompSci background I am quick to go into new procedures and tools (JIRA filters FTW!) and I have to admit that one (me) sometimes forgets that tooling is not a goal in itself.


You cannot document experience
I'll leave you with the following question: if you are in a panic, who would you prefer to talk to, a 10 year veteran with no documentation and rules, or a recent graduate with 30 years of rules and documentation to help him?




* Thank you for proofreading Hendrik!