In a conversation with a friend once, they jokingly described their inability to play racquetball against other seasoned players as "They are playing racquetball, while I am just hitting a ball around the room."
I'll borrow that reference and apply it to Software Production Support.
Is your Software Production Support group "playing racquetball," or are they "just hitting a ball around the room?"
From a distance they can appear like the same activities. On closer inspection however, one is much more organized, elegant, patterned, and proactive--while the other is only reactive.
Finding the order from all the choas separates the effective from the ineffective.
There are three particular areas your Software Production Support team should be focus on. These three areas are:
1. Maintaining Systems
2. Managing Customer Expectations
3. Become a Quick-Reaction Force
1. Maintaining Systems:
Think of your production servers like a fleet of cars. In a fleet plan, the company sends every car to get an oil change after x number of miles, a tire rotation after y number of miles, and a general tune-up, fluid change, etc. after z number of miles. This pattern repeats itself for the life of the car that is serviced by the fleet manager.
How often are your server hard drives defragmented? How often are the transaction-logs backed up? How often are the indexes reindexed, and the statistics updated?
How often are memory settings adjusted for performance? Latest patches applied? How often are your servers checked to see if there any impending disk space issues?
To maximize system performance, create a "fleet plan" for your servers which checks all of these items at regular intervals.
2. Managing Customer Expectations:
If a server fails, do you know which systems depend on it? If a database goes corrupt, do you know which applications need it, and which corresponding business units will be impacted when that happens?
Do you have a way to communicate to those groups immediately?
Create a dependency map for your products. A dependency map illustrates which servers host which databases, and then which databases are used by which applications, and finally the names, numbers, and email groups of the business users that are affected by that server/database failure. This will enable your team to proactively manage your customers expectations. You can notify them before they have to notify you.
3. Become a Quick-Reaction Force:
The SWAT team, the FireStation, and the Ambulance services all have something in common: they are ready to take action at a moment's notice.
They have the information they need available to them, and additional services available with a simple call.
Do your products have support information organized and readily available? Do you have the names and numbers of your account representative for each third-party product or tool you support? Do you have the product-support phone numbers and your support plan credentials readily available?
Do you know who knows what about each application in your enterprise? Who programmed it originally? Who has supported it lately? Which business units use it? Where is the source code located?
Keeping information about each system updated in a central location should also be part of your "fleet plan."
Another effective tool for a Quick-Response group is a monitoring system. Something that indicates the overall attitude of each of your production servers? Disk Space available? Will the system reply to a ping? Is SQL Agent running? Is that required Windows Service up and running? Monitoring tools like Nagios can do this for you.
Another great idea is to keep a lessons-learned log for each component you support. Track problems, fixes to problems, assumptions to be confirmed, and ways to test if the component is functioning properly.
All of these pieces in place will make your production support much more effective.
So, think about it...is your Software Production Support team playing racquetball, or are they just hitting a ball d a room?
Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com