Importance of clear requirements & Service Level Agreements

IT industry in India is entering another interesting phase – on one hand the effect of global melt down is not fully over yet – job market on the other is all abuzz! I say so as although inputs emerging from across the world suggests a recovery, Indian IT industry largely being service oriented sees changes – chill or thaw, with a lag of quarter or two. We are obviously not neutral to these changes and are hiring. However results of our efforts were not to the expectations.

During recent review we tweaked the process and also modified the inputs we provide to recruiter and voila! We are now happy as that small change has had an alchemy effect. What did we do? We committed to recruiter that we will respond queries within one business day (and thereby reinforcing this project is important to us). We also modified our input to make it easier to understand as recruiter doesn’t have same vocabulary as my engineers do.

I have similar and related experience to share with respect to service delivery levels. Until recently I used to manage SoftDEL’s IT infrastructure. During the challenging times of 2009, like many business enterprises, we too had to cut IT budget and was to be done so without compromising service levels in company. In this process I saw positive impact of specifying SLA (Service Level Agreement) upfront and clearly – both on technical terms and on business terms.

These are all but experiences while being a customer. I wonder what our customers must be going through when we change the seat and move to a position of service provider ourselves? Often customers go through frustration as they don’t see their dollar returns. Global service delivery often lacks sight of local ground level application specific issues. It is thus important that we help customers by understanding business goals and technical requirements clearly and be upfront with expectation setting. For large and complex projects this itself can be a significant effort. But hey – it’s worth its time as it avoids many more meetings, phone calls in course correcting and reworked effort (thereby pulling team morale low) later on. Initial phases of our globalization process (Prodigy) focuses precisely on this aspect.

Do share your thoughts on how have you put smile on faces – either as a consumer of service or as a provider of service.