and proce- dures for assuring contracted service quality. The SLA is an agreement between the service provider and the customer which specifies the contracted service quality levels. In managing an SLA, the service provider must consider a range of its opera- tional sub-processes, including identifying and defining SLA parameters, release management and configuring operational processes and systems to support and report on the life-cycle management of the SLA. The SLA is part of the service offering and is therefore developed in the service development process, as shown by the SLA Engineering overlay box. In some cases, a customer sale negotiation may result in a new SLA requirement. In such a case, the service development process is used to establish the new requirement, if appropri- ate for the business. By overlaying Figure 8.6 on Figure 8.4, the SLA Engineering box indicates that the service configuration process may need to be involved in support of pending SLA offers. Once the specific SLA offer is available, the fulfilment process triggers the assurance process to manage SLA performance through monitoring and reporting. An SLA may include measures for performance, pricing, installation intervals, billing timeliness, time to repair, call handling and other metrics or requirements. This overlay approach can also be used to look at functional sub-processes or capabilities required across the map. Test management is an example of a functional sub-process that must support several framework processes, for example, service configuration during fulfilment, problem handling in assurance, rating and dis- counting as part of billing, and network maintenance and restoration as part of assurance or billing. Support for test management capability is managed either within the specific process or as a competency/capability function available to any process. Common processes across services and technologies are essential to: deliver to process cost targets and process performance improvement provide a consistent customer 