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Application Maintenance

What it is and why you should care

  • Enterprises are reliant on their software applications to enable their core business processing.
  • Enterprises spend 50-80% of their software development budget on maintaining existing software. Spend on maintenance is often a constraint on the dollars available for new development.
  • An application is often 2-4 times more expensive to maintain over its lifespan than the initial development/procurement costs. An effective and efficient maintenance process is critical to managing these costs.
  • With enterprises so reliant on the software applications, unmet maintenance requests for application enhancement or unscheduled application downtime negatively impact IT’s credibility with the business.
  • Whether it’s planned, routine, or emergency-related, the constant change involved in application maintenance must be managed in order to minimize possible downtime and maximize maintenance efforts without overrunning the maintenance budget.

Why use OptimizeIT for your Application Maintenance strategy?

  1. You reduce risk and long-term costs with a properly planned application maintenance strategy.
  2. You get a complete set of Application Maintenance tools all in one place.
  3. You have the ability to pick and choose individual tools as required to meet current needs, or partially completed projects.
  4. You can rely on a proven methodology for tackling application maintenance.
  5. You’ll be able to assess your current application maintenance process capabilities and design projects and initiatives to strengthen the process and fill gaps to meet long-term needs of the business.
  6. You can easily delegate tasks to the right staff to speed up the process.

What You’ll Get From the Application Maintenance Program

We'll supply the tools to help you...

Assess:
  • Develop an application portfolio strategy to clean, simplify, and eventually augment the application portfolio.
  • Assess your current application maintenance capability and maturity and document improvement opportunities.
  • Assess your current change management maturity and develop process improvement recommendations.
  • Record and evaluate key application maintenance metrics to determine how you are doing, highlight areas of concern, and identify opportunities for improvement.
Manage Requests:
  • Establish a formal process for accepting and documenting application maintenance requests.
  • Prioritize and group requests according to predefined criteria such as business requirements, budget and staffing availability.
  • Obtain approval for requests and effectively schedule changes.
Make the Change:
  • Plan the development work and document the change specifications.
  • Test the changes to be implemented.
  • Release the new application version into production.
  • Review the maintenance change cost and performance.

You'll Have Access to a Complete Toolbox:

  • Application Inventory
  • Application Status Rationalization Tool
  • Application Maintenance Self-Assessment Tool
  • Release Management Practice ROI Calculator
  • Application Maintenance Improvement Opportunities Template
  • Change Management Maturity Tool # Change Management Policy
  • Routine COTS Application Management Policy
  • Change Advisory Board Charter
  • Request Rend and Analysis Tool
  • Guide to Understanding and Reporting Application Maintenance Metrics and Trends
  • Request for Change Form
  • Request Prioritization Tool
  • Business Requirements template
  • Change Configuration Record
  • Change Advisory Board Meeting Agenda
  • Change Approval Checklist
  • Schedule of Approved Changes
  • Functional Specification Template
  • Work Breakdown Structure
  • Release Configuration Record
  • Release Schedule
  • Testing method Selection Tool
  • Test Strategy Template
  • Functional Test Plan Template
  • Test Racking and Resolution Report
  • Version Control Worksheet
  • Release Rollout Communication Plan
  • Release Approval Checklist
  • Release Post Implementation Review

And Using OptimizeIT, You Get Measurable Results:

  • Improved health of the application portfolio
  • Improved process to control requests for change
  • Confidence that change will introduced safely