ITS and Campus Service Level Agreement 2009/10

Home Service Catalog Sla ITS and Campus Service Level Agreement 2009/10

1 General Overview

2 Service Description

3 Roles and Responsibilities

4 Requesting Service

5 Hours of Coverage, Response Times & Complaint Resolution

6 Maintenance and Service Changes

7 Pricing

8 Reviewing

1 General Overview

This is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the campus community and Information Technology Services Division (ITS) to document:

• The technology services ITS provides to the campus.
• The general levels of response, availability, and maintenance associated with these services.
• The responsibilities of ITS as a provider of these services and of customers receiving services.
• Processes for requesting services.

This SLA shall remain valid until revised or terminated.

2 Service Description

2.1 Service Scope
The ITS and Campus SLA

• Defines a general level of predictability for ITS communication and services.
• Reflects how ITS does business today and the direction ITS is heading.
• References the ITS Service Catalog for clear service level descriptions.
• Describes how work will be prioritized and predicts response times including a single outage notification process.
• Includes reporting on service levels.

2.2 Assumptions.

• Services, access to services and accountability measures provided by ITS are clearly documented in the ITS Service Catalog. The ITS Service Catalog is continually be updated with additional service information regarding what services are offered, how to get services, how to get help for services and how much services cost.
• Outages to services are communicated and documented to all stakeholders via the Change Management process.
• Service are provided in adherence to any related policies, processes and procedures. See the ITS Service Catalog for policies related to a service.

3 Roles and Responsibilities

3.1 Parties
The following Principal Officers are parties to the Agreement:

Mary Doyle - Vice Chancellor, Information Technology
Dave Kliger - Executive Vice Chancellor

3.2 ITS Responsibilities
Responsibilities and/or requirements of ITS in support of the Agreement include:

• Meeting service delivery commitments outlined in the ITS Service Catalog.
• Meeting response times associated with the priority assigned to incidents and service requests.
• ITS implements defined processes to meet service level commitments
• Generating quarterly reports on service level performance.
• Appropriately notifying clients for all scheduled maintenance via the Maintenance Calendar, Service Catalog web page and/or a communication to campus via the ITS Communication Manager.

3.3 Customer Responsibilities
Customer responsibilities and/or requirements in support of this Agreement include:

• Using the defined processes for requesting help and services.
• Monitoring the ITS Maintenance Calendar and notifying ITS of forthcoming local events with ITS dependencies. Customers can use the phone, email or IT Request to contact ITS with IT related dependencies for local events.
• Responding to inquiries from ITS staff who are resolving incidents and handling service requests.

4 Requesting Service

A service request means a request is made by a customer to ITS for a service as published in the ITS Service Catalog. There are six methods of contacting ITS for all requests.

4.1 Online / IT Request (itrequest.ucsc.edu)
By utilizing the web, your request will be automatically associated with your division and visible to technicians. Request made via the web will be processed during normal hours of operation. Using IT Request via the web interface is the most efficient method to log and process incidents.

4.2 Phone (459-4357 - 459-HELP)
Phone service is available during normal hours of operation. Messages left during off hours will be processed the next business day.

4.3 Email (help@ucsc.edu)
Email request will be processed during regular business hours.

4.4 Walk-in
Walk-in service is available for services during normal hours of operation. See individual service pages for locations.

4.5 Work orders
For services that utilize work order or web forms, they will be processed from date of receipt of the complete and correct form.

4.6 Your Divisional Liaison
Contact your Divisional Liaison (DL) for services not listed in the ITS Service Catalog. The contact information for each DL is located at here.

5 Hours of Coverage, Response Times & Complaint Resolution

For all requests, the ITS goal is to have a staff member assigned and acknowledge requests within 8 business hours of receipt. Campus priorities may require exceptions to this goal during certain times of the Academic year.

5.1 Hours of Coverage

• The Support Center hours of operation are 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday – Friday except federal holidays, University holidays, and announced University closures. Customers may use any of the methods of contact as stated in Section 4.
• Tickets the web interface and email can be sent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and are processed during the next business day. Using IT Request via the web interface is the most efficient method to log and process incidents.
• See the ITS Service Catalog for specific hours of coverage for individual services or your DL for local hours of coverage for local services.

5.2 Response
For responses to incidents, the ITS goal is to assign and acknowledge requests within 8 business hours of receipt. Many services have faster incident response times; please refer the to service catalog web page for individual incident response times. An incident means any interruption in the normal functioning of a service or system.

For incidents that generate a large amount of tickets, a mass mailing may be sent out in lieu of an individual response.

5.3 Prioritization
If you consider your incident request urgent, contact ITS at 459-4357. This will ensure your ticket is routed as quickly as possible. Examples of urgent incidents include reporting a service outage or reporting an impact to instruction.

For reference, ITS has a set of criteria to prioritize a request as urgent based on a global campus view of IT needs. ITS prioritizes incoming incident requests as “urgent” priority if it meets any one of the following criteria:

• Significant number of people affected.
• Organizational structure is a multiplier for number of people affected.
• Percentage of total tasks that can no longer be performed by individuals.
• Academic and Administrative Calendar deadlines.
• Significant impact on the delivery of instruction.
• Significant or lasting impact on student academic performance.
• Significant risk to safety, law, rule, or policy compliance.

5.4 Escalation
If you are not satisfied with the level of service on a request, contact your Divisional Liaison (DL) or Bill Hyder, Director of ITS Client Relationship Management (CRM). They will categorize and process your input as appropriate and respond to you with the action taken.

5.5 Information
If you have a question, phone, email or IT Request. The Support Center will route your ticket to the appropriate area.

6 Maintenance and Service Changes

The Change Management process within ITS minimizes unintended service disruptions or other impacts to the campus as a result of changes in the production environment. ITS does this by monitoring, managing, and evaluating changes to maximize the service benefits to the customer, while minimizing the risks involved in making those changes.

6.1 ITS Maintenance Calendar
All IT related service outages are published in the ITS Maintenance Calendar located on the ITS Web site here: http://its.ucsc.edu/maintenance_calendar/. The ITS Maintenance Calendar currently serves as the official outage and maintenance schedule for ITS. Scheduled maintenance is not included in the calculation of availability metrics.

Campus units are responsible for monitoring the ITS Maintenance Calendar to notify ITS of forthcoming local events with ITS dependencies. In most cases, the ITS Communication Manager is responsible for communicating service outages and changes to the ITS Division, service groups, and to the campus as necessary.  Off-hours service failures are communicated the following business day.

There are two categories of service outages:

• Planned Outages: A planned service outage is work that is planned and scheduled at least two weeks prior to the scheduled date. The ITS Communication Manager communicates (as needed) to the appropriate audience a minimum of one week prior to the scheduled outage.
• Unplanned Outages: An unplanned service outage is work that is unplanned due to an unforeseen event or urgent repair to prevent failure. Unplanned service outages are given priority (and communicated immediately) on a case-by-case basis depending on the type and urgency of the service failure.

6.2 Guidelines for ITS Maintenance Windows
A maintenance window is a defined period of time during which planned outages and changes to production (see definition below) services and systems may occur. The purpose of defining standard maintenance windows is to allow clients of the service to prepare for possible disruption or changes.

ITS encourages all services and systems to negotiate a maintenance window with their clients via an Service Level Agreement (SLA). If a service does not have a negotiated maintenance window (via an SLA or equivalent) the following guidelines apply:

• Planned outages should be performed between 7PM and 7AM on any day of the week. Work scheduled outside of this window should have explicit sign-off from the system steward or designated client representative.
• Planned outages and changes should not be scheduled during the first or last weeks of instruction, finals or grading week of the academic quarters, or during other significant campus events or key dates.

Production means university staff, faculty and users depend on the service to complete business and academic tasks and objectives.

Major upgrades to a service are treated as projects outside the scope of this service level agreement. Funding for major updates is negotiated on a service-by-service basis

7 Pricing

Beginning in 2007-08, the campus adopted the Information User (IU) funding model. The Information User (IU) funding model allocates the cost of central IT infrastructure to campus units based on an FTE assessment of defined information user populations with associated weightings.  See http://its.ucsc.edu/iu/ for more information and which services are IU funded.

8 Reviewing and Reporting

8.1 System Performance and Availability Reporting
Quarterly performance and availability reports will be published for review.

• First-contact response to incidents and service request is based on information from the IT Request ticket system. It will include information by division and by service and by response time.
• Resolution of high- and medium-priority tickets is based on information from the IT Request ticket system. Hours are counted as clock hours, weekends excepted.
• Outage metrics measure Planned vs. Unplanned Outages and their associated root causes; Change Management metric is the ratio unplanned outages caused by failed changes to total outages.

8.2 SLA Reviews
This Agreement is valid from July1, 2009 outlined herein and is reviewed annually or as otherwise needed.

IT Services is responsible for facilitating annual reviews of this document. Contents of this document may be amended as required, provided mutual agreement is obtained from the primary stakeholders and communicated to all affected parties. IT Services incorporates all subsequent revisions and obtains mutual agreements / approvals as required.

This Agreement is posted to the following location and made accessible to all stakeholders: http://its.ucsc.edu/service_catalog/sla/