- Application maintenance teams are accountable for the various requests and incidents coming from a variety business and technical sources. The sheer volume and variety of requests create unmanageable backlogs.
- The increasing complexity and reliance on technology within the business has set unrealistic expectations on maintenance teams. Stakeholders expect teams to accommodate maintenance without impact on project schedules.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Improving maintenance’s focus and attention may mean doing less but more valuable work. Teams need to be realistic about what can be committed and be prepared to justify why certain requests have to be pushed down the backlog (e.g. lack of business value, high risks).
- Maintenance must be treated like any other development activity. The same intake and prioritization practices and quality standards must be upheld, and best practices followed.
Impact and Result
- Justify the necessity of streamlined maintenance. Gain a grounded understanding of stakeholder objectives and concerns, and validate their achievability against the current state of the people, process, and technologies involved in application maintenance.
- Strengthen triaging and prioritization practices. Obtain a holistic picture of the business and technical impacts, risks, and urgencies of each accepted maintenance requests in order to justify its prioritization and relevance within your backlog. Identify opportunities to bundle requests together or integrate them within project commitments to ensure completion.
- Establish and govern a repeatable process. Develop a maintenance process with well-defined stage gates, quality controls, and roles and responsibilities, and instill development best practices to improve the success of delivery.
Streamline Application Maintenance Research & Tools
Start here – read the Executive Brief
Read our Executive Brief to understand the common struggles found in application maintenance, their root causes, and the Info-Tech methodology to overcoming these hurdles.Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
- Streamline Application Maintenance – Phases 1-4
1. Understand your maintenance priorities
Understand the stakeholder priorities driving changes in your application maintenance practice.
- Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 1: Assess the Current Maintenance Landscape
- Application Maintenance Operating Model Template
- Application Maintenance Resource Capacity Assessment
- Application Maintenance Maturity Assessment
2. Instill maintenance governance
Identify the appropriate level of governance and enforcement to ensure accountability and quality standards are upheld across maintenance practices.
- Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 2: Develop a Maintenance Release Schedule
3. Enhance triaging and prioritization practices
Build a maintenance triage and prioritization scheme that accommodates business and IT risks and urgencies.
- Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 3: Optimize Maintenance Capabilities
4. Streamline maintenance delivery
Define and enforce quality standards in maintenance activities and build a high degree of transparency to readily address delivery challenges.
- Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 4: Streamline Maintenance Delivery
- Application Maintenance Business Case Presentation Document
Workshop: Streamline Application Maintenance
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
1 Understand Your Maintenance Priorities
The Purpose
Understand the business and IT stakeholder priorities driving the success of your application maintenance practice.
Understand any current issues that are affecting your maintenance practice.
Key Benefits Achieved
Awareness of business and IT priorities.
An understanding of the maturity of your maintenance practices and identification of issues to alleviate.
Activities
1.1 Define priorities for enhanced maintenance practices.
1.2 Conduct a current state assessment of your application maintenance practices.
Outputs
List of business and technical priorities
List of the root-cause issues, constraints, and opportunities of current maintenance practice
2 Instill Maintenance Governance
The Purpose
Define the processes, roles, and points of communication across all maintenance activities.
Key Benefits Achieved
An in-depth understanding of all maintenance activities and what they require to function effectively.
Activities
2.1 Modify your maintenance process.
2.2 Define your maintenance roles and responsibilities.
Outputs
Application maintenance process flow
List of metrics to gauge success
Maintenance roles and responsibilities
Maintenance communication flow
3 Enhance Triaging and Prioritization Practices
The Purpose
Understand in greater detail the process and people involved in receiving and triaging a request.
Define your criteria for value, impact, and urgency, and understand how these fit into a prioritization scheme.
Understand backlog management and release planning tactics to accommodate maintenance.
Key Benefits Achieved
An understanding of the stakeholders needed to assess and approve requests.
The criteria used to build a tailored prioritization scheme.
Tactics for efficient use of resources and ideal timing of the delivery of changes.
A process that ensures maintenance teams are always working on tasks that are valuable to the business.
Activities
3.1 Review your maintenance intake process.
3.2 Define a request prioritization scheme.
3.3 Create a set of practices to manage your backlog and release plans.
Outputs
Understanding of the maintenance request intake process
Approach to assess the impact, urgency, and severity of requests for prioritization
List of backlog management grooming and release planning practices
4 Streamline Maintenance Delivery
The Purpose
Understand how to apply development best practices and quality standards to application maintenance.
Learn the methods for monitoring and visualizing maintenance work.
Key Benefits Achieved
An understanding of quality standards and the scenarios for where they apply.
The tactics to monitor and visualize maintenance work.
Streamlined maintenance delivery process with best practices.
Activities
4.1 Define approach to monitor maintenance work.
4.2 Define application quality attributes.
4.3 Discuss best practices to enhance maintenance development and deployment.
Outputs
Taskboard structure and rules
Definition of application quality attributes with user scenarios
List of best practices to streamline maintenance development and deployment
5 Finalize Your Maintenance Practice
The Purpose
Create a target state built from appropriate metrics and attainable goals.
Consider the required items and steps for the implementation of your optimization initiatives.
Key Benefits Achieved
A realistic target state for your optimized application maintenance practice.
A well-defined and structured roadmap for the implementation of your optimization initiatives.
Activities
5.1 Refine your target state maintenance practices.
5.2 Develop a roadmap to achieve your target state.
Outputs
Finalized application maintenance process document
Roadmap of initiatives to achieve your target state