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Operations Article | "Motivation & Competitiveness Framework for Application Support Teams"

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Motivation & Competitiveness Framework for Application Support Teams

- by Ashish Gupta *

Page - 1

Introduction

In today's business world, the biggest challenge for project and program managers is to keep high motivation levels of application support teams who are doing support of legacy
applications. As per the studies, 40-50% of IT projects world-wide are in the area of supporting legacy applications, and some of them are mission critical applications for customers of IT consulting organizations. A typical support involves providing following services to end-users or customers: -

Incident Management

While using application, end-users may face following categories of issues: -

  • Application Data Set-up Issues

  • Hardware, Network and System Software Issues

  • Database Tuning Issues due to Slow Performance

  • Data Corruption caused due to Wrong Application Usage

  • Data Corruption caused due to Migration and Cut-over Issues

  • Data Corruption caused due to Residual Defects in Application Software (which have not been detected in SDLC)

    Most of the incidents (except hardware, network and system software issues) are resolved by application support teams by providing a data fix so that end-user can proceed with subsequent operations or business transactions. Most of the customers need very aggressive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for incident resolution due to business continuity.

    Problem Management

    While analyzing recurring "incidents", support teams need to investigate the "root cause" and investigate whether issue relates to a residual defect in application software or not. Tasks under problem management categories are as follows: -

  • Provide Fix for residual defect reported

  • Quality Assurance of a release or patch (comprised of one or many fixes) and installing the release in production environment.

    Perfective & Preventive Maintenance

    While above two services are mainly "reactive" in nature; however, support project also requires perfective and preventive maintenance. Support teams identify weaker areas of application on a continuous basis (depending on number of residual defects reported) and plan regression testing or application software improvement tasks.

    Customers and IT organizations follow an "n-layered" support model (i.e., business help desk, IT help desk, application & production support teams) to provide solutions to end-user problems which are raised normally as a "ticket" and assigned to appropriate team for resolution.

    Next


    * Contributed by: -
    Ashish Gupta is an MCA graduate, currently working as a Lecturer at Lakshmi Narain College of Technology (LNCT), Indore.


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