Service level management consists of two very simple loops.The first loop is to understand what your customer wants, to ensure they understand the costs and implications of their choices and then agree on what you will actually deliver. Many organizations fail because they don’t do all three of these steps. For example they may go directly from understanding what the customer wants to documenting this in an SLA, without the negotiation step where the costs and implications are discussed.The second loop is to monitor what you deliver, to create both internal and customer-facing reports and to use these to continually improve the services you deliver. Many organizations fail in this loop because they just do monitoring and reporting, without identifying the opportunities to improve.The SLA is the glue that holds these two loops together.