SLA, or Outsourcing Story
Having been directly involved in a successful offshoring implementation (that actually made business sense) makes me very sensitive to piss-poor offshoring performance. A few islands down the road from our Asian Pacific island, we have some operations that are currently causing me trouble.
Most of these interactions are governed by a Service Level Agreement, or SLA, which is basically a contract with a guarantee of maximum wait time for a request and any other important performance metrics to ensure customer satisfaction and efficiency.
Even leveraging some very clever mathematical tactics, my current request is quite overdue, and I have very little foothold to contact anyone to complain. This is pretty much the story with offshoring performance inside the corporate world if the partner or department is not performing well.
The fuzzy math going on is as follows: a request for a new user account is governed by a one-day SLA. I was very excited to see that, because in the past these requests can drag on for weeks. However, they noted that the SLA actually begins not when the request is received, but when approval is received.
I thought, fair enough, why should they be accountable for a slow response from the requesting business? I can get on the ball and make sure I swing an approval as soon as possible. But reviewing the request, it said “Approval Required: No.”
When I checked the status on the web, it said “Under Review” or something like that. Seven hours later, I get an approval request. Shady. So, I get the approval turned around within an hour (I’ve already lost a full day, of course) and start the SLA clock. That was Friday afternoon, so no matter what times they’re working over there, a business day has passed by now.
I wrote an e-mail complaining about the SLA breach, and the SLA response time limit for a complaint e-mail is one business day! I wonder when they will respond to my complaint! I assume they will complete the request and then write back making me look like a jerk for complaining right before the request is completed.
This kind of stuff is maddening. I mean, I feel acutely thankful that a petty handover thing like this is my chief problem right now, but why is this a problem? This is not even a hardware request (that comes after I get the account set up). So, everything is gridlocked until that request goes through.