Develop an Annual Maintenance Program for Critical Applications
Focus on your SLAs, not costs, for driving your maintenance activities.
Onsite Workshop
Without a proactive approach to application maintenance:
- Your development teams address maintenance issues on a one-off basis, rather than investing the necessary resources for a long-term maintenance strategy.
- Your IT organization often finds itself in firefighting mode, taking the fall for poorly performing applications, dissatisfied end users, and large amounts of application rework.
- Your development teams are tasked with operating within the unknown and, consequently, lack the ability to effectively prioritize and allocate tasks to team members.
An application maintenance release schedule can help your team:
- Develop a proactive approach to prioritizing maintenance activities year-over-year for improved business satisfaction.
- Gain transparent business understanding and justification for your maintenance activities by providing insight into current and future maintenance capabilities.
- Refine SLAs based on current capabilities and future requirements for improved business‒IT alignment.
Module 1: Assess Your Current Maintenance Landscape
The Purpose
- To help you assess and understand your current maintenance landscape as well as the degree to which application SLAs are being met.
Key Benefits Achieved
- An analysis of current maintenance practices to provide insight into potential inefficiencies, opportunities, and to provide the business with sufficient rationale for conducting maintenance
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | Determine where the IT budget is being spent within maintenance |
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| 1.2 | Determine your organization’s top business priorities and the applications that support them |
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| 1.3 | Determine SLAs that your maintenance teams need to meet |
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| 1.4 | Determine the level of impact business strategy has on your maintenance activities |
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| 1.5 | Realize your capacity constraints for maintenance through utilization analysis |
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| 1.6 | Determine the level of complexity of your application ecosystem |
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| 1.7 | Determine the impact that vendors’ application roadmaps have on your maintenance tasks |
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| 1.8 | Determine the impact on maintenance for home-grown application updates |
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| 1.9 | Determine the competency of your maintenance practice |
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| 1.10 | Establish metrics to determine the level of post-implementation success |
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Module 2: Prioritize Your Maintenance Tasks and Develop Your Release Schedule
The Purpose
- To help you define critical applications to the business and prioritize maintenance tasks to complete incoming service requests in tandem with available maintenance windows.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A documented prioritization of key applications that drive business value and their associated maintenance tasks required to proactively manage future maintenance activities
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Determine the priority levels of your applications |
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| 2.2 | Categorize your service requests |
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| 2.3 | Derive your maintenance tasks from your service requests |
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| 2.4 | Estimate the effort required to complete maintenance tasks and assign timelines to their associated service request |
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| 2.5 | Determine and document your maintenance windows for the year |
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| 2.6 | Assign service request timelines required to complete each service request |
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Module 3: Prioritize Your Optimization Initiatives and Develop Your Optimization
The Purpose
- Based on discovered inefficiencies, define optimization initiatives required to improve your maintenance practice.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Discovered optimization initiatives and associated tasks required to address gaps and improve maintenance capabilities
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Brainstorm optimization initiatives for critical application maintenance issues |
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| 3.2 | Define tasks for your maintenance optimization initiatives |
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| 3.3 | Estimate the effort required to complete optimization tasks and assign timelines to their associated initiative |
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| 3.4 | Determine the ability for optimization initiatives to improve the application’s SLA fulfillment |
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| 3.5 | Prioritize your optimization initiatives based on level effort and degree of SLA fulfillment |
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| 3.6 | Identify the enablers and blockers of your maintenance optimization initiatives |
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| 3.7 | Assign timelines to your optimization initiatives based on prioritization and release schedule |
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| 3.8 | Provide a business case for each key optimization initiative to help communicate the importance to the business |
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| 3.9 | Determine where the IT budget is being spent within maintenance post-optimization |
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Module 4: Refine Your SLA and Develop Your Communication Plan
The Purpose
- Effectively communicate your findings and the steps required to improve SLA alignment and successfully complete the project to business stakeholders.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Best practice scenarios and a presentation template to communicate the application maintenance and optimization release schedule to business stakeholders
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | Determine business cases for each optimization initiative to help communicate the importance to the business |
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| 4.2 | Discover how to communicate application maintenance constraints with business stakeholders to refine your SLA |
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| 4.3 | Develop a presentation to communicate your application maintenance and optimization release schedule to business stakeholders |
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Onsite Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn’t enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our Project Workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a road map in place to complete your project successfully.
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