Application Maintenance

The challenge

• If you work with application maintenance or operations teams that handle the "run" of your applications, you may find that the sheer volume and variety of requests create large backlogs.
• Your business and product owners may want scrum or DevOps teams to work on new functionality rather than spend effort on lifecycle management.
• Increasing complexity and increasing reliance on technology may create unrealistic expectations for your maintenance teams. Business applications must be available around the clock, and new feature roadmaps cannot be side-tracked by maintenance.

Our advice

Insight

• Improving maintenance focus may mean doing less work but create more value. Your teams need to be realistic about what commitments they take—balance maintenance with business value and risk levels.
• Treat maintenance the same as any other development practice. Use the same intake and prioritization practices. Uphold the same quality standards.

Impact and results 

• Justify the necessity of streamlined and regular maintenance. Understand each stakeholder's objectives and concerns, validate them against your staff's current state, processes, and technologies involved.
• Maintenance and risk go hand in hand. And the business wants to move forward all the time as well. Strengthen your prioritization practice. Use a holistic view of the business and technical impacts, risks, urgencies across the maintenance needs and requests. That allows you to justify their respective positions in the overall development backlog. Identify opportunities to bring some requirements and features together.
• Build a repeatable process with appropriate governance around it. Ensure that people know their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable.
• Instill development best-practices into your maintenance processes.

The roadmap

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

Get started.

Read our executive brief to understand everyday struggles regarding application maintenance, the root causes, and our methodology to overcome these. We show you how we can support you.

• Streamline Application Maintenance – Executive Brief (ppt)

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• Streamline Application Maintenance – Phases 1-4 (ppt)

Understand your maintenance priorities

Identify your stakeholders and understand their drivers.

• Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 1: Assess the Current Maintenance Landscape (ppt)
• Application Maintenance Operating Model Template (doc)
• Application Maintenance Resource Capacity Assessment (xls)
• Application Maintenance Maturity Assessment (xls)

Define and employ maintenance governance

Identify the right level of governance appropriate to your company and business context for your application maintenance. That ensures that people uphold standards across maintenance practices.

• Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 2: Develop a Maintenance Release Schedule (ppt)

Enhance your prioritization practices

Most companies cannot do everything for all applications and systems. Build your maintenance triage and prioritization rules to safeguard your company, maximize business value generation and IT risks and requirements.

• Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 3: Optimize Maintenance Capabilities (ppt)

Streamline your maintenance delivery

Define quality standards in maintenance practices. Enforce these in alignment with the governance you have set up. Show a high degree of transparency and open discussions on development challenges.

• Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 4: Streamline Maintenance Delivery (ppt)
• Application Maintenance Business Case Presentation Document (ppt)