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Limiting Support Offering if Architecture not to a certain standard?

Julie Rudd
Julie Rudd Member
in Services Delivery & Operations

Hello all,

Unusual one this one, but wondered if any of you had experienced/used an approach where if a customer does not have a solid architectural set up you restrict the level of support service they have?

So for example, they have not provisioned High Availability due to a cost decision; so you state unless you have HA provision, you do not have access to aggressive SLAs or 24:7 support.

i.e. sending a message if you choose to live with risk, you don't get to abuse the 24:7 service the other customers enjoy.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance, Julie

Comments

  • Carlos Alves
    Carlos Alves TSIA Administrator, Moderator, Founding Member | admin

    maybe not so unusual... in my experience, for Managed Services contracts we had two ways to deal with these situations:

    • Keep the same SLA, but register and signed "Risk Letters" that would point the customer that they know about the infrastructure/architecture problems and they're responsible for these SLA breaches without affecting our metrics OR
    • We established a SLO period (let's say for 90-180 days) for them to work on their infra (with our help of course). During this period the metrics were not due to penalties.
  • PatrickMartin
    PatrickMartin Founding Analyst | Expert ✭✭✭

    Hello, I have not seen this in a Support context, however, in a previous life, we did ask customer to have a contact available 24/7 for Sev-1s and if they were not able to supply such a contact, we did not treat the case as a Sev-1. It was on a case by case basis, not embedded in a contract however.

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