|
|
 |
102.0 Caveats and Assumptions |
 |
This page describes assumptions that were made in the
development of SupportStep to put this material into better perspective.
This includes a certain set of terms and terminology that need to be agreed
upon so that the rest of SupportStep can be better understood. These
include:
Terminology
-
Support:
The term "support" is the generic name being used to describe the care and
feeding of production applications, tools, systems, and processes. There
are other terms that might be used in your company, such as "operations",
"maintenance” and "baseline." The term "support" is used in SupportStep.
-
Clients:
Everyone has customers, and in some companies they are called by different
names. In SupportStep, the term "customers" refers to the external
customers who purchase the products and services your company produces.
SupportStep uses the term "business client" or "client" to refer to the
internal customers that are the direct beneficiaries of the services
provided by the support team.
-
Applications: The term "applications" or "business applications"
refers to the software systems that are used to automate otherwise manual
business processes within your company. Examples of applications include
payroll, accounts payable, Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
software, time reporting, inventory management, etc. In some companies,
these entities might be referred to as "systems." Applications can be
internally developed, or they can be packages purchased from an outside
vendor.
-
Support
Analyst: This term is used to describe the person or persons
responsible for supporting a particular application. The primary support
person for an application is called the Primary Support Analyst. The
backup is called the Backup Support Analyst. It is possible (and likely)
that a person could be the Primary Support Analyst on one or more
applications and be a backup on others.
Support, Enhancements and Projects
Most organizations like to allocate people based on
high-level work categories. There are a number of ways that the categories
can be defined. The general categories used in SupportStep are:
-
Support.
The purpose of most of the SupportStep framework
-
Discretionary. This is work that can be prioritized and will be
completed based on having the resources available. This work includes
enhancements, but also includes maintenance work that is not critical.
Discretionary requests can be considered small projects and are explained
more fully in 161.0 Discretionary Requests, as well as the TenStep Project
Management Process (www.TenStep.com).
-
Projects. Support staff may be asked to work on projects as well.
Projects have a defined start and end date, and result in the creation of
one or more deliverables. These could be large projects or small projects.
They could be enhancement projects, process improvement projects,
environment-related projects, mandatory projects etc. Your support team
may bundle up many small changes into a product release. The release is
organized and managed as a project. Projects are explained more fully in
the TenStep Project Management Process (www.TenStep.com).
Management Soft Skills
The SupportStep Application Support Framework includes
a section in the methodology for managing the application support function.
In general, this could also be taken to mean the management of the support
team. However, the primary focus of the management function is in the area
of managing processes, not managing people. There are many people management
aspects that must be taken into account by the managers in the support
organization. This includes skills such as listening, leadership, conflict
resolution, etc. However, the soft skills for managing a team are not within
the scope of SupportStep.
Focus on Internal Application Support
– Not External Customers
The SupportStep Framework focuses on the internal
support of business applications. If your company sells software, you will
also have an organization established to deal with the support of your
licensed customers. Although organizations that support external customers
will still find value in SupportStep, this framework is probably not the
best overall model for that kind of support. There are many complexities
associated with external customer support that are not designed into the
SupportStep Framework.
Support Function vs. Support
Organization
It is important to distinguish between the support work
function and the support organization. It is very likely that the support
organization at your company does more than just true support work. Most
support organizations also perform small and/or large enhancements. It is
possible that projects can also be executed in the same groups that do
support. SupportStep contains information for managing the discretionary
enhancement work (small projects). However, this aspect of work is covered
more exhaustively in the TenStep Project Management Process (www.TenStep.com).
SupportStep focuses entirely on setting up and managing the support
function.
Different Types of Support
Organizations
Most of the general content of the SupportStep process
can be used by any support organization, regardless of the specific products
and services that your company produces. However, much of the specific
content in SupportStep is targeted at the support of business applications
(see definition of “applications” above). If you have a team that supports
your ongoing sales and marketing programs, for instance, they could also
benefit from much of the content of SupportStep. However, some of the
material, including templates, would not be of specific interest to them. On
the other hand, you could use the basic SupportStep templates as the
starting point to create other related templates that would be of more
value.
Low-Tech Templates
Most of the templates in SupportStep are simple MS
Excel and Word documents. The templates are in this format so that you can
easily see what information is on them and what the value of the information
is. The templates do not have to be implemented in this format in your
organization. If you use Excel, for instance, you will likely want to
combine a number of related SupportStep templates as multiple tabs in one
larger spreadsheet. Also, if your organization has access to more
sophisticated tools, you can implement the templates in that technology
instead. For instance, many of the templates would be good candidates to
place in MS ACCESS, Lotus Notes and HTML/web.
|
