The Underpinning Agreements table holds records for all Operational Level Agreements and Underpinning Contracts negotiated between the IT department and specific internal teams or outside service providers.
These agreements define the main contact information for the other party, the support hours and services and tasks that are covered by the agreements.
This function is controlled by the ITIL Functions table. It has been turned off by default. See ITIL Functions for information on how to enable it.
The tabs and fields of the Underpinning Agreements are described below.
The Details tab holds most of the fields for the Underpinning Agreements. It is very similar to the fields for SLAs. It defines the request types that will be covered and the type of Agreement (OLA or Underpinning Contract). It includes description and scope fields to define what the agreement will cover. It defines the team that owns the agreement, as well as the team that will be assigned to tasks related to the agreement. It also defines the support hours that will govern time measurement for tasks related to the agreement.
Just as for SLAs, the Date Activated field indicates when the agreement was made active, while the Next Review Date defines when the OLA will be set to In Review.
If the Agreement Type is Underpinning Contract, there are some additional fields to identify the Vendor and contact information, as well as a link to fields in the Contracts table, which may hold the details of the contract with the vendor.
The Company table holds all service provider and other companies, while the External User table holds contacts outside your company. See Companies and People Table, Employees and External Users for more details on these background tables. The contracts table is part of a fully functioning contract management system and can be used to manage and store any service provider contracts. See Contracts for details on the contract management setup.
The Services tab is used to link the agreement to specific Business Services, and from there to specific service offerings linked to those business services. It is also where the OLA targets are defined.
The OLA Targets table is used to define the resolution target times for tasks related to an OLA. The difference between OLA Targets and SLA Targets is that they do not apply to a whole service request or incident, but to specific tasks within that request that are predefined to be covered by an OLA or UC. Therefore there is an extra step to set up the targets, which involves linking them to specific task templates to which they will be applied.
Just as for SLA Targets, the OLA Target is also tied to, and applied based on, the priority of the request or incident.
The Tasks tab displays the task templates to which the OLA will apply. Task templates are created as part of a task workflow once the OLA has been created, and they are linked to the relevant OLA, which causes them to appear here. Also on this tab are all actual Tasks done under this Agreement, with some statistic fields measuring the number of breached agreements and percentage of breached agreements. This allows the effectiveness of all OLAs to be reported on from the Underpinning Agreements table as well as from the Tasks table.
The History tab shows dates fields and the history of all changes to the record.
The default table view provides a quick summary of the effectiveness of all Underpinning Agreements.
This report shows the average percentage of breached agreements by the assigned team.
This report is run on the Tasks table.
