Application Support & Maintenance project planning and initiation

Application Support & maintenance project planning and initiation.

There are various parameters which should be considered before starting the project in Application Support. Application Support & Maintenance project planning and initiation phase requires evaluation of certain parameters to determine the number and level of resources, Support coverage hours and the SLA (Service level Agreement):

Overview of the application

Business functionality of the application should be understood with the process flow and mapping of each function with the application module. Availability of technical documents and user manual.

Complexity of the application

This should clearly describe the application complexity in technical terms, e.g. number of transaction modules, inbound/outbound interfaces, Batch processes etc.

 Technology

We should know the technology used to develop and deploy the application.

 Age of the application

The year when the application has gone live.

 No. of active users

Number of users created in the application who use the application regularly.

No. of concurrent users

Number of users work in the application at any point of time concurrently.

Peak hours of usage

The time when the usage load on the application is the highest.

Stability of the application

This can be determined based on following:

1. No. of issues reported daily
2. No. of on-going enhancements
3. No. of pending critical issues
4. No. of downtime reported on a particular frequency

Once above factors are understood and discussed, One can determine the following for Application Support project initiation:

1. No. of Support Analysts required
2. Level of Support Analysts
3. Skill sets of Support Analysts
4. Support coverage hours
5. SLA – TAT (Turn around time) of different service types in Application Support service