Preparing the Organisation Before Writing SLAs

Before writing SLAs, an organisation should sufficiently understand the service, its customers, current capability, measures, dependencies and governance. Service level management is a negotiated bridge between consumer needs and provider capability, so negotiation should start from evidence rather than document wording. Agreements then stay live through measurement, review and improvement.

• Identify services and customers, assigning an owner to keep that information current.
• Baseline current performance and validate measurement capability, so that every commitment can actually be measured, and agree a calculation for each measure.
• Align internal and supplier dependencies, documenting decision rights and escalation paths where several functions or suppliers contribute.
• In the article's example, a provider delays negotiation until it can distinguish current performance from aspiration and expose a supplier constraint. Review the result with delivery teams and affected consumers, because operational success and experienced value can diverge.
• Track baseline coverage, measurable commitments and dependency alignment as a set, and avoid asking customers for targets before knowing capability, committing to unmeasurable levels, or starting with document wording. After the first cycle, check whether dependency alignment moved for the intended reason and whether any group experienced a worse result.