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Re: Ever seen a service level agreement for a tech pubs department
Subject:Re: Ever seen a service level agreement for a tech pubs department From:"R. Mason" <rpmason -at- kc -dot- rr -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:21:20 +0000
Milan,
An agreement between you and the people who receive or support your documentation is a good thing.
SLAs as used by IT and the business, specifically ITIL, can be very complicated to develop and adhere to. ITIL SLAs describe the delivery and support of a whole service, such as e-mail or file storage. A non-ITIL SLA can be anything you want it to be.
Underpinning an ITIL SLA are Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) and other 'stuff'. Individual OLAs are where the delivery and support capabilities of the various IT pieces (network, system administration, storage, and such), are defined. Very simply stated, all the OLAs that affect a service are added up and summarized in the SLA.
Do you want an agreement from your SMEs that they will provide information? Do you want a definitive list of what documents are developed? Those items could be an agreement within project management or your SDLC.
Do you want an agreement that a definitive list of documents are delivered as part of the service? How quickly does the business expect you to change and release a document when an error is found? Those items could be part of an ITIL-type SLA. Pubs would have an OLA that describes the specific pubs delivered and how quickly you could fix an error.
R. Mason
I don't work under an SLA since I write internal IT documentation about ITIL. There is a chance that I will be working under one (and an OLA) as our data center is considering providing customized ITIL software as a service to other IT departments within the business.
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