Why your SLA reporting isn't telling you the truth
Green traffic lights, unhappy users: typical patterns in provider reports and how to expose them.
All KPIs green, yet the business keeps complaining? Then your provider is not lying – your reporting is measuring the wrong things. And that is rarely an accident: SLA reports are built by the very party whose performance they evaluate.
The usual distortions
Read enough provider reports and the patterns become familiar:
- The measurement point sits with the provider, not the user. Metrics are taken at the platform’s edge – the network, VPN and login between platform and user never appear in the report.
- Averages instead of percentiles. A monthly mean of two seconds hides that it is twenty every Monday morning – exactly when everyone wants to work.
- “Planned maintenance” doesn’t count. A legitimate exclusion – until you notice how generously things get planned, and who picks the time.
- The ticket stopwatch stands still more than it runs. Status “waiting for customer”, downgraded priorities, reopened tickets counted as new ones: the reaction time is correct, reality is not.
- Availability per system instead of per business process. Five systems at 99.5% each chain up to barely 97.5% – the report shows green five times while the process is down.
How to recognise it
The symptoms are reliable: reports that have not shown a single SLA breach in years. Penalties that never fall due. And business-side satisfaction that has fully decoupled from the report. A report that is never red is measuring the wrong things.
What effective governance does differently
The lever is not harder negotiating but measurement design: measure where the user works. Percentiles instead of means. Define exclusions narrowly and count their usage. Think availability along the business process, not along the system list. And independently spot-check the provider’s numbers.
This is contract and measurement craft – and it usually pays off before the next contract renewal. An independent outside view helps twice over: it knows the patterns, and it negotiates without the blind spots of grown relationships.