Efficiency: A typical support model has multi-layers to provide support to end-users of applications, i.e., business help desk, incident support team and problem support team. The key to success of support structure lies in minimum number of "open tickets" across all support layers at any given point of time. Efficiency of support team is a critical factor to meet this challenge.

Agility: One of the key challenges to make support model successful is to have increased responsiveness. Normally, customer defines aggressive service level agreements (SLAs) for support teams as part of contract. Turning around the tickets within agreed SLAs always becomes the biggest challenge for the support team.

High Availability of Application: Global applications have requirement to ensure availability of application in almost 24x7 modes (> 99.9% availability). To meet this objective, it is very important that "support releases" (collection of ticket fixes solved by support teams) are very stable and reliable when these are applied in production. Therefore, quality assurance of ticket fixes becomes the key to providing highly stable releases. Moreover, ticket fixes should not result into introducing "new" problems in the live application (Fix one problem, introduce many more).

Team Motivation: Application support teams work under tremendous stress and strain due to very nature of role and aggressive customer demands. It is mainly due to long working hours, working in shifts, and providing support as per customer time zones. The problem is also compounded as employees perceive work as uninteresting, as legacy applications are based upon old technology. Also, due to repetitive nature of work (as compared to bespoke development and product customization assignments), after certain period, people get frustrated while working in these assignments. Majority of IT companies leverage the offshore capability to support the legacy applications due to lower operation costs, and sometimes it results in communication problems as well. Due to slow initial learning curve and to ensure best support services (as applications are complex), employees are allocated for a comparatively "longer" period in such projects and "Job Rotation" becomes a key issue. "Low Team Motivation" caused by above factors becomes difficult nightmare for project manager(s). Despite having robust support processes, support services are impacted and in some cases, "loss of customer" becomes a potential risk factor.

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