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The first step in creating help desk Service Level Agreements (SLA) is to create a Service Catalog. At its most basic level, a service catalog is a list of all the services your help desk will provide. In most cases, an SLA is used to define the support requirements of a team to which the help desk escalates cases:

• The subset of the service portfolio visible to customers. It consists of services presently active in the service operation phase and those approved to be readily offered to current and prospective customers.
• A database or structured document with information about all live IT services, including those available for deployment. The service catalog is the only part of the service portfolio published to customers, and is used to support the sale and delivery of IT services.
• A service catalog markets an authorized service portfolio, or subset. A service catalog consists of one or more descriptions of current service offerings and optionally, future service capabilities.

The help desk may have internal goals for first call resolution, average speed of answer, and so forth, but debugging software application issues often fall into a black hole when they are assigned outside of the help desk. It is these escalated cases as well as the issuing of new user logins, computers, and software packages, that will benefit the most from defined SLAs.

Creating a service catalog to begin defining your service levels is always easiest where you have a help desk management system and good data to measure. If you have already divided your cases into meaningful categories and/or subcategories, you can start by reporting on the categories that have the highest volume of cases in a given month. This will vary from organization to organization.

After you have listed your categories from highest volume to lowest, review the list and think through the value of a defined SLA for each. If it doesn’t make sense, also determine if your category is appropriate. You may need to look at more detailed information or redefine your categories to make them more or less detailed.

With your list of case categories that should have defined service levels, report on the actual performance against those service levels. You may find that installing software takes one day to turn around, but creating new user logins takes three. You may find that deploying a new laptop or mobile device takes two weeks when you thought it was only taking a few days.

Now that you have a basic service catalog and a baseline of performance metrics, you are ready to begin the process of defining service level agreements with your support teams. Implementing SLAs is outside the scope of this article, because it is an complex process that requires working through management and people issues that may lie outside of conventional organizational boundaries.

Get started now on your service catalog, since it is your first step to achieving SLAs. It makes escalated support performance objective and helps put you in control of case management.