How to reduce Application Maintenance costs?

Maintenance requirements vary depending on type of business and the applications used. Requirement for maintenance may occur because of  

• sharp increase in transaction volumes 

• increase in business process enhancement 

• support requests which are caused by a lack of system flexibility

This increases incidents and user support requirements.

Application maintenance organizations are very careful when it comes to application maintenance. They set up a fixed team of people who are pre-trained on the application so they can attend to high priority work quickly during such times when the number of support requests is high. The size of the team is set to handle this increase in the number of requests. As a result, they have excess capacity and in turn excess costs when maintenance is not at a peak.

Reasons for high application maintenance cost:

1. When handling high priority maintenance issue/problems, one should have prior knowledge of the application. The kind of knowledge that is required to support and maintain applications cannot be acquired from specification documentation and user guides. This knowledge is usually attained with experience over a long period of time so maintenance teams cannot rapidly adjust the available resources to respond when the numbers of requests increase.

2. Most incidents are due to recurring problems. The support staff responds to the initial incident but the underlying cause to permanently eliminate the problem is rarely fixed. Hence, the recurring problems contribute to increase in the number of support requests.

3. Systems are designed and built in such a way that they require maintenance because they are not made robust using user controlled parameters and dynamic data validation as it increases the development costs. These decisions increase future maintenance costs and impact reliability.

Reduction in costs:

1. Fix recurring problems to reduce incident request which in turn reduce maintenance cost.

2. Add functionality to enhance flexibility with user-controlled parameters to decrease the need for enhancements and user support.

3. Document support knowledge and cross-train others so that people can multi-task across applications to balance increase in maintenance requests. This improves utilization of human resource and allows them to be shared across applications so that Application Maintenance resources costs are reduced.

In addition to these recommendations, development teams must avoid adding long-term maintenance requirements when they build applications by making it robust. Reducing service levels and implementing good application maintenance processes can yield short and long-term cost reduction results with minimal consequences on day-to-day business activities.

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About Author:

Harpreet Kaur Dua 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: harpreet.dua@spluspl.com