Service level management (ITIL 4)

Parent Process Reference Framework: ITIL 4

Service Value Stream Activities

Highly impacted Service Value System(SVS) Activities:

• Plan
• Engage

Description

The purpose of the service level management practice is to set clear business-based targets for service levels, and to ensure that delivery of services is properly assessed, monitored, and managed against these targets.

Service level: One or more metrics that define expected or achieved service quality.

This practice involves the definition, documentation, and active management of service levels. As services may involve a ‘bundle’ of varied and disparate activities, a number of these will need to be combined and aggregated to reflect a realistic view.

Service level management provides the end-to-end visibility of the organization’s services. To achieve this, service level management:

• establishes a shared view of the services and target service levels with customers
• ensures the organization meets the defined service levels through the collection, analysis, storage, and reporting of the relevant metrics for the identified services
• performs service reviews to ensure that the current set of services continues to meet the needs of the organization and its customers
• captures and reports on service issues, including performance against defined service levels.

The skills and competencies for service level management include relationship management, business liaison, business analysis, and commercial/supplier management. The practice requires pragmatic focus on the whole service and not simply its constituent parts; for example, simple individual metrics (such as percentage system availability) should not be taken to represent the whole service.