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Is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your users a waste of time. As far as I’m concerned the answer is yes. I’m sure there are folks that will come up with all sorts of “it depends on the situtation” answers to the question, but I’d say that for the most part those folks are, either detached from the day to day maintenance of whatever is trying to be measures, or untrusting of the people who are charged with those duties, or perhaps a little of both.

Just so everyone is on the same page let me start with some assumptions. An SLA is an agreement with your customers (whomever they may be) that you will maintain a certain level of service. It’s a contract that both sides agree on, one side attempts to maintain the terms and another enforces those terms. When dealing with a vendor, an ISP or hosting service (I come from a tech background so we’ll stay in that field) an SLA may be necessary. It gives the customer potential recourse if the vendor fails to meet the terms of the contract. But when talking about departments within an organization creating SLAs with each other I’d argue that any time spent on creating and attempting to montior or enforce an SLA is wasted time better spent doing just about anything else.

I recently read the book Rework by the folks over at 37singals, the creators of Basecamp, Campfire, and Ruby on Rails, among other things.  It’s an excellent, and concise book about business, productivity, and keeping “it” simple. The consistent message of the book, and one that I agree with, is that effort expended on things that don’t support the core of your business are a waste of time. And two things that I think waste a lot of time for both managers and employees are managers hovering over subordinates to make sure their doing “enough” work, and searching for someone to blame when something goes wrong. An SLA is pretty much both of those things rolled into one.

A business needs to hire people it trusts. People who are capable of doing the work and dedicated to getting it right. By association the departments these people work in need to be focused on the success of  the business. If they aren’t, well, what the hell are they or their departments doing there? Tracking employee and department performance is a necessary part of any business, though perhaps not in the minute detail that managers often feel. Those tasks can be accomplished in periodic performance reviews or some other mechanism. But the SLA isn’t a measure of performance or dedication. It’s just a mechanism to hold people accountable, and not the warm fuzzy OZ Principle definition of the word.

An SLA takes time and resources to create, edit, maintain and update. And it’s not an insignficant amout of time or effort to do those things. All of that effort could be spent on more valuable tasks. Things that support the core business and add meaningful value to the organization. Some might say, ” well it’s not that much work to create an SLA.” I’d say they’re probably living in a fantasy land. Because you’re not just talking about the time it takes to write the document. There’s time spend researching metrics. Meetings (oh God the meetings!) on what the thresholds should be on each metric. Time spent on developing some sort of method of monitoring the SLA so you know if it’s being met. And the immeasurable expense of the time and stress imposed on those who spend their time looking at that monitor to see if they are going to meet their arbitrary numbers. Tie those metrics to performance reviews and bonuses and you’ve just created a receipe for anomosity and bitterness directed at the SLA and most likely, by association, the ones that gave the directive to have it created in the first place.

Accountable people (this time I’m using the warm fuzzy definition) will do whatever they can to address the needs of their customers.  If servers go down or a service measured by an SLA is unavilable, an accountable team will do whatever they can to make it work again. Because their customers are the people they support. They don’t need a contract tell them that they should do these things, they just do it. They also don’t need a monitor to tell them that things aren’t going well, they know. Is it valuable to know that an SLA metric was missed 3 months ago? Nope. Do you think the people responsible for that SLA are aware that things didn’t go well even without the existance of the SLA? You’re damn right they do! Having that history only serves to point out past failures. And pointing fingers at your past  failures is just about the most useless waste of time I can think of. People and businesses alike need to focus on what went right not what went wrong and find ways to repeat those things. I’m not saying that you should ignore the things that didn’t go well. I’m saying you should acknowledge mistakes and then move on.  Focus on your successes if you want more sucesses. If you spend all your time wallowing in your failures I’m pretty sure all your going to get is more failure.