Application Support: Work Flow

Through our Legacy Application Support service offering, we provide support processes for the fundamantal types of work events which support teams deal with in day-to-day support operations:

• Application Maintenance & Enhancements (planned and scheduled)
• User Technical Support (un-planned and un-scheduled)
• Incidents (Break Fix) and Problem Management (un-planned but may be scheduled)

The process for addressing each of these events varies by event type.  The following diagram describes the flow of each work event and the interaction among the work events.  The activities to be supported during the engagement are defined in terms of these work events.

Application Support Work Event Process Flows

Maintenance & Enhancement Work Requests

Planned maintenance activities will be based on formal requests for service (work requests) encompassing the following types of work:

Corrective Maintenance:  Reactive modifications to an application performed to correct discovered faults.  These requests frequently result from application failures and problems reported by Operations, the Help Desk, or the user community.

Adaptive Maintenance:  Modifications to an application performed to accommodate a changed or changing environment.  These modifications typically add to or create new functionality in the application and its users are most often the sources of these requests.  All such requests must be approved and prioritized by steering committee.

Perfective Maintenance:  Modifications to an application performed to improve performance, or maintainability.  These requests originate with functional users.  These requests must be approved and prioritized by steering committee.

User Technical Support (call support)

The team responds to questions from the user community regarding systems operations and utilization.  This activity may involve 24 x 7 coverage, depending on the requirements of the user community.  Call support may include both level 1 and level 2 support.  This is based on the level of support provided by the Help Desk function.  Frequently, this activity may require extensive investigation and consume considerable time without any measurable deliverable.  Consequently, logging and tracking the time dedicated to this effort is essential to improving operational efficiency.

Incidents & Problem Management

Incidents typically involve unscheduled, corrective maintenance performed to keep an application operational.  Events such as abends, production errors, and emergency problems identified by Operations, Help Desk, or the user community will be reported to the support team.  The team provides the following emergency maintenance/production support:

• Direct and immediate response to both critical and non-critical events occurring during normal working hours (weekdays 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.).
• Off-hours response primarily limited to those critical events occurring after hours (weekdays 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., weekends, and holidays).  This after-hours support is provided through the use of an on-call rotating duty roster and beepers.