SLA Measurement is usually driven by a desire to ensure increased control over service providers and shared services centres or by regulatory factors such as MiFID.  Whatever the reason SLA Measurement - whether it is in Finance, IT, HR, Facilities etc. can often be an extremely manual and time consuming process.    In many cases the manual effort associated with SLA management can lead to neglect in undertaking SLA measurement.  SLA Measurement is the process of ensuring that you get regular updates on performance against agreed SLA metrics. 

Try something a bit more sophisiticated than spreadsheets to measure SLAs effectively and efficiently!

The process of creating SLAs can itself be difficult and is the subject of much discussion elsewhere on my blog.  The SLA Measurement process is really the ongoing management of the SLAs.      My advice is to ensure that you put an effective process in place to ensure that SLA are measured on an ongoing basis.  The point here is to ensure that you understand what activities need to be undertaken every month to get the information you need to report against the SLAs and to send that information to the relevant stakeholders.  In many cases you will go for months without any real demand for the SLA reports – but just remember – when you need SLA reports you will need them for the previous six months or a year.  Dont fall into the trap of assuming that just because no one is asking for SLA reports that you don’t need them. 

Most organisations nowadays are trying to move away from SLA spreadsheets and manual processes.  The level of effort involved in such an approach really is unnecessary – the impact is that valuable people spend time pulling together reports rather than analysing them.   The clever folks out there are moving to next gen SLA management tools.  Try to find something that you can use for all your SLAs and that can also be accessed by third parties. 

Happy Measuring!