Effective Utilization of Application Support Budget

Application Support and maintenance comprises a major part of an organization’s budget. Also, the requirements of support activities can vary significantly from time to time. Increase in business enhancements can lead to spike in the volume of support requests / queries and incidents. On the contrary, a lull in the requests is often a common scenario which results in a wastage of skilled resources and cost.

Below are some of the challenges faced by support teams:

1. Managing available resources during times of spike is difficult because most of the knowledge gained for support activities besides technical knowledge is through experience which is difficult to pass on during project peaks.

2. Strategic opportunities and projects are mainly the focus of the business, thus placing application support on a lower priority.

3. Many incidents are occurred due to recurring problems which are not being eliminated from the root. This accumulates unnecessary support tickets which can be avoided by performing a root cause analysis of such incidents and coming up with effective solutions.

4. Skilled support staff cannot be easily replaced. And since support projects go on for a long period of time, employees cannot be easily assigned.

5. Most of the knowledge / information remain undocumented. Document received from development team is not updated to reflect changes that happen later.

The above challenges are commonly observed among application support projects. Some of the ways to address these issues are mentioned below:

1. All recurring incidents must be analysed to find the root cause. These incidents must be fixed such that they do not occur again. Thus, the number of tickets will reduce saving time and cost
2. All support incidents must be logged in prioritized based on pre-decided criteria depending on the impact it has to the business. This will help in tracking each request and ensuring that it is resolved within a certain amount of time as defined in the SLA.
3. In order to better utilize the staff during a spike in support activities, all support knowledge must be documented. Documents must be maintained in a common language comprehensible to all and updated from time to time to avoid referring outdated information.

4. The time taken by each request must be tracked in order to generate reports and anticipate future resource demands. This will provide insight on which requests take maximum time and thus take measures to reduce resolution time.

5. In order provide business justification for the support activities and to offer visibility, develop metrics to measure the value of support services and also reward employees. This will help to substantiate the efforts taken and help provide data to clients as and when required.

In the absence of management of support activities, the budget allotted may get utilized in very less time and thus prove a bad decision for the business. It is essential that all support activities are tracked and managed efficiently following the above mentioned steps such that the budget allotted is effectively consumed and also benefiting the business. 

About Author:
Kintu Racca is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at kintu.r@spluspl.com