STSM.SP 2.1 Establish Properties of Standard Services and Service Levels
Summary
Establish and maintain properties of the organization’s set of standard services and service levels.
Description
Multiple standard services and service levels may be required to address the needs of different customers, units of the organization, markets, or application domains. In addition to establishing standard services, services can be grouped into service lines when the size and complexity of the set of services warrants further organization. The organization develops standard processes to deliver standard services.
Example Work Products
- Critical attributes of standard services
- Organization’s set of standard service levels
- Templates for service level agreements (SLAs)
- Tailoring criteria
- Common and variable parts of standard services
- Grouping of services into service lines
- Needs and expectations for service systems that deliver standard services
Subpractices
1. Select standard services.
The selected standard services should adhere to organizational policies, standards, and models.
2. Specify the critical attributes of each service.
- Features and benefits
- Available service levels and categories
- Costs
- Current users
- Intended users
- Service components
- Service delivery system
- Related services
3. Determine common and variable parts of standard services.
Variable parts of a standard service can be assigned categories and parameters. Standard service levels can represent some of the degrees of variability in standard services.
- Pricing
- Subservice providers
- Criteria for using customer components
4. Organize services into service lines as needed.
This organization of services into service lines can include ensuring an appropriate integration among services.
5. Define service levels.
Defined service levels make the levels of service that are offered specific and measurable. Service levels can help to balance cost and demand for services, and make roles and responsibilities between the service provider and user clear.
Determining service levels includes the following service requirements:
- The maximum acceptable continuous period of lost service
- The maximum acceptable period of degraded service
- Acceptable degraded service levels during the period of service recovery
- Redundancy requirements
Standard service levels may be reflected in standard SLAs or templates for SLAs.
- Provider and user responsibilities
- Availability of the service
- Agreed service hours and exceptions
- Anticipated service volume
- Response times for service incidents and requests
- Performance or quality targets
- Key measures to monitor
- Reporting and escalation procedures
- Consequences of failure to achieve a service level
- Variations available (e.g., “gold” service)
6. Establish tailoring criteria as appropriate.
The organization uses knowledge of variability in customer needs to develop tailoring options that limit risk and improve customer satisfaction and time to market while maintaining consistency across the organization.
The tailoring criteria and guidelines describe the following:
- How the organization’s set of standard services are used to guide the development of individual services
- Mandatory requirements that must be satisfied by the defined services
- Options that can be exercised and criteria for selecting among the options
- Procedures that must be followed in performing and documenting tailoring
- Criteria for selecting standard services from the services approved by the organization
- Criteria for selecting service components from the organization’s set of standard services
- Procedures for tailoring the selected services and service components to accommodate specific needs
- Modifying a service level
- Combining components of different services
- Modifying service components
- Replacing service components
- Reordering service components
- Adapting the service for a new customer need or work environment
- Customizing the service for a specific use or class of similar uses
7. Identify needs and expectations for service systems that deliver standard services as appropriate.
In situations in which the organization will need to develop and maintain multiple service systems to deliver its standard services, it can be beneficial to establish core assets at the organizational level for developing and customizing such service systems.