EngagementsIT services

Design experience-level agreements for a digital-workplace engagement

For workplace-services and service-management leads moving from SLAs to XLAs, and for buyers who want to know what they are signing.

Engagement type
Team Pod
Experts
2 delivery · 1 advisor
Hours
~50
Duration
3 weeks

What the client needed

A firm needed to understand how experience-level agreements are ideated and implemented in digital-workplace engagements: how the XLA conversation starts with enterprise clients, how the XLA framework is built — metric identification, selection, prioritisation and weighting — how XLAs are measured, best practice and pitfalls, and what efficiency levers — year-on-year productivity, automation, low code — are built into such engagements and how they differ between second-generation and later-generation outsourcing deals.

The brief

The questions on the table

As the client wrote them, lightly shortened. Client and respondents are not named.

  1. Q1

    How does the XLA conversation start with enterprise clients, and what makes it stick?

  2. Q2

    How is an XLA framework built — which metrics, how selected, how weighted?

  3. Q3

    How are XLAs measured, and what are the pitfalls?

  4. Q4

    Which productivity and automation levers are built into digital-workplace engagements, and how do they differ between second- and third- or fourth-generation deals?

The hours

What the work involved

  1. 01

    Origin and framing

    How XLAs enter a digital-workplace deal — from client dissatisfaction, from renewal, from a provider pitch — and how the framing survives procurement.

  2. 02

    Framework

    Metric identification, selection, prioritisation and weighting, with the measurement methods that work and the ones that produce arguments.

  3. 03

    Delivery levers

    L1 and L1.5 effort, governance and PMO, cross-functional services, waterfall versus DevOps delivery, and the efficiency percentages built in for productivity, automation and low code.

  4. 04

    Generational view

    How year-on-year productivity commitments differ between second-generation and third- or fourth-generation outsourcing, with the reasons.

  5. 05

    Working session

    With the client’s workplace-services and contracting leads; the senior advisor reviewed the framework and the efficiency commitments.

Deliverables

What the client received

  • Origin and framing noteHow XLAs start.
  • XLA frameworkMetrics, weighting, measurement.
  • Delivery-lever modelEfficiency percentages by lever.
  • Generational comparisonSecond versus later generations.
  • One working sessionWith notes.

The terms

What an engagement like this costs

You buy hours in blocks and can change the expert at the end of any block, at no extra cost. Longer projects run in stages: pause after a block, pick up the next stage when you are ready.

Pricing in full →

Rate band
$65–$250 /hr
Senior specialists can be up to $500
Hour blocks
1 · 2 · 5 · 10 · 20 · 50 · custom
This engagement
Team Pod · ~50 hours · 3 weeks

More in IT services

Moving from SLAs to XLAs?

Describe what you need

For example: “Our workplace-services renewal has to carry XLAs and a productivity commitment; we need a framework the client will accept.”

We aim to come back with matched experts within 24 to 72 hours.