Reference no: EM133518942 , Length: word count:2000

Service and Operations Management in IT

Assessment - Service level agreement design

Your Task

• Establish a service level agreement (SLA) contract based on a case study.
• Provision of critical reflection of supplier relationship.

Assessment Description

You are the CIO of the company and during the COVID pandemic the company's business needs to move to online. The CEO comes to you as CIO of the company to request the draft of the SLA contract.

You have discussed with various partners in within your team and different areas of the business, and have identified the following areas as key concerns that needs to be addressed:
• Business relationship management
• Demand and capacity management
• Availability management
• Access and Security management
• Incident and problem management
• SLA review and future changes

Learning outcome 1: Determine the information and technological requirements for effective IT service delivery in diverse organisational contexts.
Learning outcome 2: Evaluate the performance of partners and suppliers in ensuring the effective delivery of IT services within organisations.
Learning outcome 3: Design IT value streams and processes that underpin an organisation's products and services.

Assessment Instructions

You, as the CIO of the organisation, need to produce a draft SLA to the CEO, which then will be used as drafting the final agreement between the company and system supplier.

Students must conduct research externally and included references in order to produce a well referenced case study. You should use at least ten (10) sources of information and reference these in accordance with the Kaplan Harvard Referencing Style. These may include websites, social media sites, industry reports, census data, journal articles, and newspaper articles. These references should be presented as in-text citations and a referencing list at the end of your assessment (not included in the word limit). Wikipedia and other ‘popular' sites are not to be used.

The SLA would need to include the following questions:

Part 0 - Introduction

• Provide an introduction and brief overview of the software, and its strategic position of the software in the company.
o Note: You can select a suitable case study. You will need to provide these details and assumptions in this section.

Part 1 - Agreement Overview

• Provide an overview to the agreement (in the form of an Executive Summary)

Part 2 - Business relationship management

• Identify and list 4 strategic requirements and desired outcomes of the system.
• Define patterns of the business activity proposed with the system.
• Discuss the stakeholders included in the agreement.

Part 3 - Demand and capacity management

• Identify and explain key peak periods where the system may experience stress from excess demand.
• Identify the impact of inadequate management of system capacity during high demand times.
• Develop strategies to ensure sufficient capacity is maintained during times of high demand.

Part 4 - Availability management

• Identify key components affecting system availability.
• Discuss strategies for both the company and supplier to maintain the availability of service.
• Discuss how system upgrades and maintenance are conducted whilst minimising the unavailability of the system.

Part 5 - Access and Security management

• Discuss 4 key access control items within the system.
• Discuss key security risks within the system and identify responsibilities between both parties to manage these risks.

Part 6 - Incident and problem management

• Discuss responsibilities between both parties to manage and responds to incidents and problems.

Part 7 - Changes to SLA

• Discuss required intervals where the SLA is subject to review.
• Discuss the process where the agreement is subject to amendment.
• Discuss the responsibilities where the agreement is subject to review.

Part 8 - Reflection

• Reflect on the vendor-user relationship with the software to your company.
• Identify and explain the type of supplier would you categorise it and provide recommendations to the CEO on strategies to manage the relationship with the vendor.