Importance of efficient workforce for Application Support

During the early stages, application support was always considered secondary while purchasing an application or software for your company. The main focus used to be on the pricing and features of the application. However, this has considerably changed over the years. It’s been universally accepted that application support plays a vital role in smooth functioning of any application / software.

Recently, organizations have started realizing that just application support for a year or so is not sufficient but it is important that the work force providing support should be skilled and efficient along with sound infrastructure. This change in the mind set has occurred because of the following reasons:

1. Proper understanding: This is a major difference between a skilled and efficient workforce and normal workforce. The efficient type will make sure that they understand the business processes and the application supporting it thoroughly so that issues and change requirements can be managed and satisfied without misinterpretation and difficulties.
2. Efficiency and Accuracy:  Skilled and experienced work force having proper understanding will resolve the issues within the speculated SLA (service level agreement). Also, the solution will be a long lasting solution and not a work around solution. There will be minimum reworks which will save time and energy. This helps in smooth functioning of the application. As a result, business does not get affected in spite of upcoming issues. Thus, proper understanding with appropriate skills and experience brings in efficiency and accuracy.
3. Change Requirements Delivery: Change requirements are easily interpreted and understood by skilled and efficient application support team as they already have a great understanding of the application and the business processes. Also, proper and practical timelines to deliver the change requirements are given. This helps the business users to plan resources accordingly for the growth of their business. Follow-ups are reduced and change requirement implementation goes smoothly with any reworks and obstructions.
4. Documentation: Documentation is done by almost everybody in an organization. However, effective and easily understandable documentation is done by very few. It can be in various forms such as Information Discovery Document, this helps business users and the application support team both to be on the same page and have a clear picture what is to be done and what has been done. Thus, if anybody new joins the organization does not have to go through intensive and time consuming training to understand the support related deliverables and application related documents.
5. Effective Communication:  This is an important aspect of Application support. Communication can be through various mediums such as audio, reports, emails etc. Skilled and experienced application support team follows industry accepted and methodologies of communication effectively which a layman can understand easily. This saves time which is wasted in conducting meetings to understand the same. Another important aspect is to have the willingness to communicate. Most of the time, Application support team acts as a mediator between the Technology and the Business, hence they have to be very well versed on how to communicate with people from different domains.
6. Discipline, Determination and Commitment:  These three qualities are very important for any support team to be efficient and skilled. These are the reagents that are required to make an efficient and successful support team which would make a visible positive difference in the business process and organization. Positive attitude and a problem solving approach towards each and every issue make the issue resolution process comparatively easy and less stressful. This helps in providing appropriate solutions which are reliable with least number of re-works. Thus, making the application more stable and consistently efficient.
7. Task Prioritization:  This is an important but mostly neglected aspect of application support. An efficient application support team always takes care of this practice of prioritizing tasks. This helps in sorting out tasks and resolving critical issues which if not resolved have the potential to stop the business processes. Thus, due to prioritization such tasks are taken up first and resolved in no time so that business keeps on going smoothly in spite of other low priority issues are still pending.

Thus it can be seen that application support managed by an efficient and experienced team helps reduce wastage of time, provides accurate and reliable solutions, plays an important role in continuously improving the application and business process, makes sure that functioning of business is not interrupted at any cost and provides a crystal clear picture of the status of the application and related activities to the management. All this unanimously will aid to development and growth of business.

About Author:

Harish Mani is senior consultant and is important part of Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. think Tank. He in Systems Plus actively contributes to technology and information security. He can be contacted at: harish.m@spluspl.com