Role Of Training In Application Support

What is application support? It’s a SERVICE.

Application support involves providing assistance to IT services delivered to the business users in an organization. This may entail an application support team to have knowledge on basic computer programming, administrator skills and analytical skills. Identifying the root cause and providing the right solution or passing it to the right team for resolution also plays an important role. The application support team deliver these needs in the form of a SERVICE.

Some tasks undertaken by an application support team are as below:

• Analyze and manage issues in ticketing system on timely basis
• Create new business users and manage access levels
• Create and maintain necessary documents for operational and security audits 

An application support team need to be equipped with knowledge of responding to the dependencies via acknowledgment, updates and resolution. They should be provided with structured training as they will be dealing with different people, both on business as well as IT level of understanding.

It becomes important for an application support team to understand the domain thoroughly for resolving the problem and providing the right solution. This becomes possible when the application support team is provided with training on the domain and application. 

Training is imparted in different ways, depending on the type of business process.

When is the training required?

• It is required when a new executive/resource is on-boarded on the project
• Whenever a new feature/functionality is added to an existing product
• When a new project is assigned to the application support team

Following are some attributes essential for an application support team:

1. Communication skills and Active listening: This is the most important aspect in application support. In order to communicate with the business users to understand the queries and provide resolution all the executives should be trained on verbal and written communication. It is important that the details of the query are interpreted correctly. Soft skill trainer should be appointed to provide the training to the team. Evaluation (verbal and written) should be conducted periodically to confirm if there was value addition due to the training

2. Investigation and analytical skills: Queries raised by the business user’s need to be addressed and investigated within the given response time. It’s important that an application support team understands the query to analyze and provide solution. Many companies plan to build analytical skills through mentoring. Analytical skills can be tested by conducting quizzes, providing small assignments relevant to the project etc.

3. Business and domain awareness: It is important for a support team to have a proper domain knowledge about the client business. Having the domain knowledge makes it easy to understand the requests or queries raised by the client or business users. Training on the domain can be provided with the help of training materials or domain experts. Also, prepare test materials to check the understanding of the executive.

Conclusion:

Training presents a prime opportunity to expand the knowledge in a particular domain and is important in terms of dealing with the customer. Proper training will not only help in the development of the company but also the support team to understand and gain knowledge about the business. This would increase the productivity and quality of service.

About Author:

Tresa Kursingal 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: tresa.kursingal@spluspl.com