IT Staff Convention 2008:Negotiating Service Level Agreements with Faculty
From Provider Notes
Negotiating Service Level Agreements with Faculty
- Moderator: Helen Anderson, School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
- Notes: Mike Lazenka, Information Systems & Computing
Contents |
BATNA
Helen started the session by asking if anyone was familiar with the term BATNA - Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. In essense, the practice forces you to think in advance of negotiating and ask the question: At what point is it better to walk away from a negotiation than to continue.
Helen provided the analogy of selling a house. The home has a selling price, but sellers also know at what price they're willing to sell. This figure often takes into account things such as the amount due on the loan, equity in the house and a variety of other factors.Conversely, buyers have a similar set of criteria and bottom lines which when crossed, would render the deal unfavorable.
Based on an informal count of hands, it appeared that very few audience members have had the opportunity to study negotiations. Helen provided some information about a combination "negotiation" and "working with difficult people" workshop she had taken in Boston. Wharton offers negotiation classes.
Courses are offered around country. In addition, the library has a wealth of material from some subject matter experts who also teach in the Wharton School.
Understand what your "counter-partner" needs/wants.However, some indicated that vendors often are very willing to negotiate due to their desire for business. Some cited negotiation with child.
General ideas about how to approach SLAs
From the application development side, some thought that it would help to define service levels and expectations. It would help a developer scope a project better. Define a common, agreed upon language. "Always available" can mean different things to different people.
AIT is enhancing the ISC methodology - Program Management at Penn (PMAP) - which incorporates processes for negotiating project deliverables and helps define scope of a project. This methodology will soon be available to all groups who manage projects and programs at Penn.
Faculty Negotiations with new Faculty
Faculty are facing a variety of challenges when they arrive on campus. Helen provided an overview of a faculty member begins his or her tenure at the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.
- Faculty are vying for tenure as soon as they arrive.
- Administration is seeking a body of work to be published by the new faculty member in a fixed period of time.
- - To assist with this, SEAS provides them with a "startup package", which includes a lump sum of money to be used in their endeavor.
So a variety of things are contributing to pressure that new faculty feel in their first several years on campus.
Faculty Negotiations with tenured Faculty
Once a faculty member gains tenure, he or she is virtually unable to be fired. This shifts the balance of power even more in favor of faculty and limits the amount of leverage a staff person has in the process. To bring parity to the negotiation process, Wharton has a faculty advisory board which vets all projects proposed by Faculty. This leaves decision making in the hands of a faculty member's peers and brings parity to the negotiation process.
Some school representatives said it would be difficult to engage faculty in the advisory process and/or maintain a high level of commitment to the process.
A few commonalities emerged among those who provide support, and as an outgrowth, are forced to negotiate service or support levels with faculty members.
- It is VERY difficult to impress upon faculty that there are limited resources in IT that must serve the needs of the entire organization.
- Other groups have more identifiable boundaries about what is realistic and what an organization can deliver. An example was a faculty member wanting support for a desktop image that was created outside of the central IT organization. In this instance it is possible for that group to limit support to desktops that use a IT approved image.
- Some schools have had success directing heavy consumers of service to Deans or Department Chairs to address the needs of the faculty member.
- One school includes "resources" as a primary component of any negotiation with faculty. There is an explanation of how startup costs are different from replacement costs and replacements must be managed on a cyclical/annual basis with a limited number of items being replaced each year.
- Faculty respond harshly when their simply told no - offering options or alternatives is helpful in arriving at a workable agreement.
- Honesty is key. Acknowledge faults when they occur.
- Rank has its privileges so in many schools a new faculty member may not get as much consideration as a tenured faculty member.
Components of Faculty SLAs
The group spent some time reviewing some of the common components of Faculty SLAs. Among them:
- Hours of operation, response times, and resources
- - A few organizations represented in the room are charging hourly rates for these SLAs, but not many
- - Who will provide the service or how many FTEs
- What are specific customer or faculty goals and how will the SLA assist in reaching them
- Uptime
- Performance such as load handling, simultaneous connections etc.
- Escalation Paths
- - Who to call if the helpdesk is not available
- Status or affiliation
- - Who has a right to use the application, or who gets support
- Service specific (email, desktop)
- - This is much more common than specific hourly rates. Many groups are doing this type of SLA.
- Local Department or Central
- - How will service differ if the faculty member is located close to the School or far away
- Uniform configurations vs custom configurations
- - Cost differentials, delivery dates, and support for customizations
Some words of caution
- Some schools detailed having bad experiences when they relinquished control of the hiring and priority setting for a resource being used by a group or department. While the scenario seemed similar to services offered by ISC's Support on Site.
- Informalities can make negotiation points non-existent. Capture the details!!!
- If you are negotiating SLAs with parties outside of Penn, get the office of General Counsel involved.
Factors for Success
The following points were made during the session that have helped many in the group negotiate successfully SLAs with Faculty.
- Be very specific with performance metrics. For example, what a faculty member means when they say "working" can be very different from what we mean when we say "a working cluster".
- Guaranteed uptime
- - ISC doesn't guarantee uptime, but it does set target uptime goals. It then allocates resources, defines services, and develops pricing of the service to ensure that target goals are met.
- Having a template to capture the key questions for the faculty member can be helpful to both parties. It can help capture details:
- - Uptown requirements
- - Disk Space needs
- - Backup requirements
- - Security requirements
- How will escalation to the next level of management be addressed?
- - Junior workers should be instructed to avoid negotiation. Provide them with a baseline set of requests to which they can say yes and have them escalate more complex requests up the management chain within your organization. It protects a junior level staff person from over-committing and allows them to be the "yes" person.
- Don't allow the faculty to define the solution. Have them define the problem and have your organization define the solution. For example, don't allow them to purchase something that is unsupportable to solve a problem.
- Develop a set of standards, or base support decisions on parameters defined by ISC's desktop recommendations and supported products.
Other items
The subject of "At Home" support was raised briefly. Based on participation, it appears that very few organizations provide at home support to faculty, however most make a few exceptions for VIPs.
