Streamline Application Maintenance
Effective maintenance ensures the long-term value of your applications.
Onsite Workshop
Application maintenance practices lacking standardized structure and alignment to strategic objectives causes:
- Ad hoc and reactive handling of maintenance requests, resulting in inefficient use of resources and delays to business operations.
- Misalignment between the work being done and the business and IT priorities for applications and the business processes they support.
- An inability to accurately assess the full impact of maintenance changes and take necessary steps to inform and include appropriate stakeholders.
Building an optimized and streamlined application maintenance practice will:
- Allow maintenance teams to receive, assess, and prioritize requests in a timely, accurate, and value-driven manner.
- Ensure development of maintenance changes is completed in accordance with business and IT priorities and maintains the critical elements of an organization’s operations.
- Effectively balance resources spent in maintenance with other development projects.
Module 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: | Outputs: | |
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1.1 | Define priorities for enhanced maintenance practices. |
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1.2 | Conduct a current state assessment of your application maintenance practices. |
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Module 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: | Outputs: | |
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2.1 | Modify your maintenance process. |
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2.2 | Define your maintenance roles and responsibilities. |
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Module 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: | Outputs: | |
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3.1 | Review your maintenance intake process. |
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3.2 | Define a request prioritization scheme. |
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3.3 | Create a set of practices to manage your backlog and release plans. |
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Module 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: | Outputs: | |
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4.1 | Define approach to monitor maintenance work. |
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4.2 | Define application quality attributes. |
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4.3 | Discuss best practices to enhance maintenance development and deployment. |
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Module 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: | Outputs: | |
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5.1 | Refine your target state maintenance practices. |
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5.2 | Develop a roadmap to achieve your target state. |
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