application , projects , security

Sample – Application Maintenance and Project Support Methodology

June 30, 2013

“Managed Service Provider” provides maintenance services for its clients Application Systems that cover a wide range of technologies and businesses, and are typically critical to a client’s business. Our consultants take a proactive approach to Application System maintenance, by focusing on long-term functionality, stability and preventive maintenance to avoid problems that typically arise from incomplete or short-term solutions. This approach, coupled with our quality processes, allows our clients to continually reduce recurring maintenance costs. While we perform most of the Application System maintenance work using secure and redundant communication links to our client’s systems, we also maintain a team at the client’s facility to coordinate certain key interface and support functions.

We believe that a matured support plan would lay the foundation for an effective application maintenance and development support framework for our clients.

Project Initiation Phase

  • To define the scope of work for onsite/ offshore
  • To translate client’s objectives into detailed SLAs, procedures and guidelines
  • To develop connectivity and infrastructure plan

Knowledge Transfer Phase

  • To understand client’s business and technical environment
  • To understand systems to be maintained and supported
  • To draw up detailed plan for maintenance and support

Knowledge Acquisition 

Activity Description
Business Overview
  • Team will get to know the Top level functionality
  • Main Processes will be discussed during this phase
Technical Overview  
  • Team will get an understanding on Technical Architecture
  • Development Environment will be discussed
Understand
  • Team will understand the History of maintenance and problem logs
  • Standards, Testing and Acceptance procedures will be looked upon
Analyze existing system metrics  Team will analyze the existing metrics. Following are some of the metrics which will be analyzed during this phase:

  • Number of programs
  • Program performance
  • Present and planned support base
Planning  Once the above phases are completed, the team will plan for the following:

  • Maintenance Plan
  • Finalize Team
  • Structure (Onsite/Offshore/Offsite)
  • Fine tune team size
Connectivity  After the teams are finalized and the plans are made, following activity takes part:

  • Finalize Connectivity requirements
  • Establish connectivity from Offshore/Offsite
Finalize Service Levels  Service levels are discussed based on the historical data and the commitment from “Managed Service Provider”:

  • Quality metrics
  • Productivity metrics
  • Maintenance metrics
 Interaction with external teams Once the service levels are finalized, the team will have interactions with the following team:

  • Operations council
  • Database Administrators
  • Change Control Board
  • Third Party Vendors