You get what you pay for and no more….Availability Management (as part of the Anti Service Management Framework)
On more than one occasion, I have heard clients complain about availability targets – customer never happy – always wanting more, but not prepared to pay for it…. Normal issues faced by Availability Managers… It’s interesting that the goal of Availability Management is to “deliver a cost effective and sustained level of availability”. This is where I have issues – I think the last part of that goal should state “based on what you are prepared to pay for”! If this was part of the goal – it would change the way we see availability:
- Suddenly we “mark-up” cost of services so they can’t afford to pay for the best – and so settle for less… great for us, costly to them
- We start capping availability when it reaches a certain level – if you agree to 95% availability and its end of week – and you are still at 98%… bring it down!!!!! – the last thing you want is the business to get more than they paid for – pretty soon they will start expecting more… without paying for it!
- Or we start pricing based on unavailability…. (though not sure how you would do that… each % of unavailability costs $xx, with a depreciating price scale????)
I know it sounds absurd – but aren’t we the ones who introduced the concept of availability to our customer??? So then aren’t we the ones who has the ability to control how availability is managed?????
Hmmm- I think there is something in that for all of us, don’t you???
Till next time
Cheers from The Art of Service
Michael
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