Best practices of SLA

SLA is very important part of launching systems to the customers.
Without this issue offer sent to the customer isn't complete. A lot of
people aren't aware of importance of that.
People, who aren't in the developing environment don't know that
creating the software is not enough for the customer.

Without Service Layer Agreement nobody will support customer, when some
updates, and/or corrects will need to be done. The amateur developer
would do the job for free. But this is not professional.

People usually associate service with hardware, and its damages.
Software needs to be serviced too. And not free of course (what is
good for developing companies).

Regarding to this fact, I was looking for good practices in some
branches, and I found one, which could be good example to show, what
should be noticed, when creating SLA for the company.
The branch, which I'm talking about, is mobile systems. Below are
listed few of the issues, which should be mentioned, before signing the
SLA with the customer.

The first one is SLA with SIM card provider. Author says about
activation process, locking the SIMN card, and upgrading the SIM. This
is very important in this case, because, when having the mobile system,
it is very common, that WWAN connections will be established. SIM
cards are necessary to do that.

The next one is network issue. It means - when the signal is worse,
when is better etc.

The other thing is the quality of voice. The PDAs with WM5 Phone
Edition can be used as a Palm, and/or as a phone. This is why voice
quality, when talking is so important. Measuring this factor is
described little more detailed in the article.

The other topics mentioned in the article are: messaging, e-mail (must
be higher than 95% in the 90 seconds delay) data (HTTP access
in 99%).

The other points described in the article are about fault handling,
billing, and the penalties related with the SLA. The last one is very
important. Why is that? This is simple. The offer between two
companies is very strict, and needs to be said the penalties related
with not following the agreement.
I encourage you to read about this article, which is quite good, but
not brilliant.

In my opinion this information are too general, and should be
described more detailed, because creating SLA of mobile, based only on
facts read in the article could ruin project, and bring problems for
the receiver of the service.
However, in my opinion this article is really nice for the people, who
want to know something about SLA in general.


Source:
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=634909&subref=simplesearch