Application Support, ITIL, and Measurement and Metrics – How Can I Learn More (and Get PDUs in the Process)?

As a sister organization to Computer Aid, the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute’s (ITMPI’s) main goal is to promote best practices in the areas of Software Process, Software Metrics, Software Estimation, and IT Governance. One of the ways it does this is by offering live webinars and maintaining an archive of previously recorded webinars.

In keeping with the spirit of this blog, we’ve reviewed the upcoming live webinars and would recommend you try to catch the following

• Planning and Managing your Maintenance & Support Budget
• Governing Your ITSM Implementation
• Understanding Process Data Enough to Improve It
• Metrics that Motivate Behavior
• Introduction to Project Estimation
• Using Benchmarking to Drive Improvement Initiatives

And when you can’t attend, we record the webinars and provide them for free viewing for the first week after the webinar has aired. After that time, you can purchase access to the webinar for a nominal fee.

These webinar recordings are stored in our webinar archives. There is a search feature that allows you to search either by category or by speaker. There are several categories you can search, including Application Support, ITIL, and Measurement and Metrics. Some of the more interesting results from these searches include:

• Productivity of Software Maintenance (Application Support)
• What Are You Getting for Your Software Maintenance Dollars? (Application Support)
• Using ITIL to Improve Application Support by 20-30%, a four-part series (ITIL)
• Enterprise Measurement: What Makes it Useful to All of Us (Measurement and Metrics)
• Measuring the Immeasurable: What is Your Real Performance Capability? (Measurement and Metrics)

Look over the full list of webinars and maybe purchase some. Then chat with us about what you’ve learned, the topics you’d like to see us offer, and suggestions for improvement.

How We Provide Visibility, Control, and Optimization to Yield World-Class Application Support?

The focus of this blog has been management of IT services, including Application Support. We pride ourselves on our ITIL  Application Support Methodology, which gives us the following capabilities that set us apart from our competitors:

The ability to standardize a business’s application support environment around industry and client-centric best practices

The capability to automate desired behaviors and outcomes to institutionalize success throughout the entire IT organization

The discipline and tools to measure all relevant data points providing high levels of management and team visibility to enable a rich, service level driven environment

The ability to provide an unprecedented level of Visibility, Control, and Optimization of the application support environment

One of the tools we use to achieve these capabilities is Tracer. Tracer provides visibility and control into any IT service activity, whether it is operational services, unscheduled on-demand requests such as problems and consultation requests, or scheduled projects and enhancements. Of course, each service category requires different management processes, which can be configured for individual customer sites.

One final note: Tracer has a partnership with SEER. “SEER provides a systematic approach for estimating the resources and scheduling that software development requires, and an unparalleled capability for trade-off and risk analysis.” SEER is a complete CMMI Project Management solution by Galorath that establishes estimates and automatically generates project plans based on those estimates, monitors projects against the plan, and aligns measurement and analysis activities.

Take a look around for yourself. Let us know what you think about our methodology, tools, and partnership. By all means, contact us if you think you have a project that would benefit by a management solution such as Tracer or SEER Tracer.