In production support world, we all have been reminded time and again that being proactive is the key to avoiding pain. I cannot agree more.
In fact, I would like to take it a step further. Proactive approach from the inception of a new project / change.
Most of the times pro-active support is defined as having all the monitoring in place to detect & fix issues before users can experience any glitch. This approach works fine most of time. However there are still outages leading to loss (monetary / regulatory / reputational / etc). These can be mitigated further if support team involves in a much earlier phase of the project.
Generally support teams get involved when a change is ready to be packaged and deployed. An early involvement of support team can identify major maintenance related issues which are generally not taken in account by Development teams. Whether it is log file management, memory management, DB growth, Firewall issues, the list goes on. This will also help in better support documentation and released components will not be just a black box for the support team. Many times new releases require new/modified support tools as well which are better identified pro-actively.
Information is the best weapon for support staff. Early engagement of support will increase the quality of support documentation which can be built upon as and when the project moves into different phases.
No comments:
Post a Comment