SLA: to Sign or Not to Sign

We present our experience of a three-week fieldwork in the form of a contextual inquiry with a service manager at the EPFL IT department. During these three weeks, we encounter a refusal of a user committee to sign a service-level agreement (SLA). We describe the context in which this refusal occurs, and we uncover our findings about the core of ITIL’s service-level management that building relationships is more important than bounding to a contract.