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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.

TRACER: 360 Degree Visibility & Control within IT Service Management

TRACER – Revolutionary Innovation in IT Service Management

Tracer was designed for use within the day-to-day IT service management work environment with low administrative overhead. Tracer’s table driven design for all major components helps focus IT service professionals on “work” not “data entry”. The flexibility of Tracer’s configuration tables allows easy adaptability to virtually any IT operating environment. The real-time customizable dashboards display all assigned work tasks to developers and support personnel, using color coding (red, yellow, green) to highlight tasks approaching or exceeding service level goal thresholds.

Resource/Task time tracking is integrated within all work processes and brings a dramatic increase in the accuracy of time and work related data reporting. Accurate and timely data collection and reporting are necessary to effectively manage the IT service organizations work and resources.

Many IT software tools have some of the components, functions and features that are standard with Tracer. However, only Tracer has all these critical IT process management and work tracking components built-in. 360 degrees of visibility and control within IT service management:

  • Defined process templates for application support and development
  • Process enforcement based on configurable process rules
  • Work, resource and time tracking
  • Managing by Metrics – SLA based metrics graphs, trends and work / resource status reporting

All components function seamlessly within a single integrated operating environment and data repository. Tracer best illustrates the principle that “The whole is greater then the sum of the parts.”

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IT Support Services Comments

  • Bob Anderson: Daniel, from a certain point of view you are correct. CMMI- DEV deals primarily with software development best practices, the old CMM Level-5 dealt a great deal with defects. However, as you know the ...
  • Bob Anderson: Gunter, there are many possible SLA components and metrics that can be defined for any application software support. First I would recommend that you read this article which I had published in Compute...
  • Bob Anderson: Amiet, I would put it under the "Incident" process and track dates, number of occurrences, how much lost time, cause (who did it). You will need data for management if the practice has to stop. If you...
  • Bob Anderson: Amit, first of all why is the customer powering down the equipment? This should be brought to the attention of management and a very strong note sent to whoever is doing this.  If they are doing it on...
  • Bob Anderson: Mark, it is doubtful that you can fix the problem, it is mainly a management issue. The best you can do is to gather statistics on the backlog of enhancements, the number and severity of incidents, an...

ITIL V3 Application Support Q & A

If you have any question on the blog content or have some specific question on how ITSM & ITIL can dramatically improve performance and reduce the cost of your Application Support service "Ask Bob"
Question :
Answer :
Gunter, there are many possible SLA components and metrics that can be defined for any application software support. First I would recommend that you read this article which I had published in Computer World on "How to create Meaningful IT Support SLA's"  use this link...
Question :
Answer :
Daniel, from a certain point of view you are correct. CMMI- DEV deals primarily with software development best practices, the old CMM Level-5 dealt a great deal with defects. However, as you know the folks who developed the original CMM  were not really initially inter...
Question :
Answer :
Amiet, I would put it under the "Incident" process and track dates, number of occurrences, how much lost time, cause (who did it). You will need data for management if the practice has to stop. If you want to be "proactive" in stopping this practice" you must capture bu...
Question :
Answer :
Mark, it is doubtful that you can fix the problem, it is mainly a management issue. The best you can do is to gather statistics on the backlog of enhancements, the number and severity of incidents, and how many technical support calls from users you get and the average...
Question :
Answer :
Amit, first of all why is the customer powering down the equipment? This should be brought to the attention of management and a very strong note sent to whoever is doing this.  If they are doing it on their own without any instruction to do so and it affects other user...