Consulting Journal: Methods

Methods: Job SLAs?

by David Blakey

The advantages of attaching a form of SLA to job descriptions.

[Monday 5 April 2004]

In many areas of consulting, it is possible to use methods and techniques from other areas. One such example is service level agreements. The contractual structure for providing or acquiring services is to have a main contract with one or more service level agreements in place under it. The main contract describes the nature of the services and the SLAs describe the quality and quantity of those services.

Service contracts

Generally, the main contract is unchanged during the life of the contract, although some new services may be added and some existing services removed or modified. It remains a fairly static, strategic document.

The SLAs change more often, depending partly on the volume of business that they support and partly on how critical they are to that business. With time, services tend to more more critical to the business as they become more embedded. As an example, early order processing applications were not especially critical to a business; now, their successor provisioning systems are absolutely critical.

Job descriptions

The same model can be applied to job descriptions. The job description itself describes the functions of a job. The criteria and measures of job performance can be written into the equivalent of a service level agreement. A few years ago, people signed contracts for services without service level agreements, and employees agreed to job descriptions without job performance requirements. Today, it is common to attach SLAs to contracts, but it is unusual to have job performance requirements as a separate document to the job description. Many organizations attempt to include the job performance requirements as part of the job description. This rarely works.

People who try to meld the job performance into the job description have overlooked an important point. The job performance requirements are about quality and quantity, and the job description is about the functions of the job. Putting them together compromises both and produces an unsatisfactory result.

Here is an example. Assume that the job description for a marketing manager includes the following.

build brands for new products;
develop and extend brands for growing products;
protect and maintain brands for established products;

Job performance

Imagine that you are planning the marketing manager's performance criteria and measures for the coming year. You have one well-established product, A, that is a cash cow. Your have another product, B, launched last year, that is gaining market share and is profitable. There may be opportunities for extending B's branding to other products. A new product, C, will be launched during the coming year.

What do you include in the job performance requirements?

First version

You will probably think first of product C and establish a performance criterion based of its launch: establishment of sound branding; acquisition of market share.

Then you may think of product B and its continuing establishment: making the brand stronger; using the brand for other products.

Finally, you may think of product A: protecting its brand; ensuring its market share.

Second version

You will want to go on to define some priorities. In normal circumstances, the establishment of product C is likely to have the highest priority. If there is a major problem with protecting product A, you may want the marketing manager to concentrate almost entirely on repairing the damage and restoring the brand. So you will add some escalation clauses to the job performance requirements.

If little work is needed on establishing product C, you will want to write in priorities for handling product A and product B.

In this second version, the job performance requirements will become a working document, subject to change and review either on schedule or because of an event. This makes it the parallel of a service level agreement.

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