Managed IT Support and Service Delivery Plan

An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is the formal agreement between a service provider and a customer regarding performance metrics like response and resolution times. An SLO (Service Level Objective) is a target metric defined within that agreement that the IT team strives to meet to ensure they do not breach the SLA. While breaching an SLA usually results in financial penalties, missing an SLO is used internally to refine workflows and adjust staffing.

Incident severity is determined by business impact and urgency, typically ranging from Priority 1 (P1) to Priority 4 (P4). A P1 incident represents a critical business outage where a core system is down with no workaround, such as a company-wide network failure. In contrast, P4 incidents are minor requests or cosmetic issues, like a single user requesting a software setting change, which have no impact on operational capacity.

Standard plans should explicitly exclude major project work, such as complete cloud migrations, physical office moves, or deploying entirely new enterprise software suites. It should also exclude the cost of replacement hardware, support for unauthorized personal devices, and recovering data from disasters caused by unapproved client modifications. These excluded items should be handled under separate, project-specific Statements of Work (SOWs).

A service delivery plan should be formally reviewed on an annual basis to account for major infrastructure changes, new security threats, and team scaling. Additionally, a minor review should occur immediately following any major change in the client's environment, such as a significant shift to hybrid work or a major software migration. Regular quarterly business reviews (QBRs) serve as the perfect collaborative checkpoint to ensure the plan still aligns with current business operations.