Service Levels You Can Actually Agree On: Turning 'Fast and Reliable' into Operational Agreements

Business people routinely ask for systems to be “faster, more reliable, and cheaper” without a shared vocabulary about what that actually means in operational terms. In this episode Mirko Peters walks through how to convert those fuzzy expectations into operational agreements—service level objectives (SLOs), measurable indicators, and error budgets—that reflect business value and real technical constraints. This is not a lecture on tooling or a vendor pitch; it’s a consultant’s playbook for negotiating, documenting, and enforcing agreements that reduce surprises, speed decision making, and create transparent trade-offs. You’ll get concrete examples of common expectation mismatches, questions to ask in the first 30 minutes of a conversation, and pragmatic ways to phase agreements so they’re useful from day one. The target is clarity: fewer rework cycles, fewer escalations, and a practical path from demand to delivery that both sides can defend.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-it-it-business--6867401/support.To continue the conversation, follow Mirko Peters on LinkedIn, where more insights and real-world examples are shared from both business and IT perspectives.