Support Phase

f Support Phase

Introduction

Phases

Support Activities

>> Support

>> Identify Defects and Enhancements

Phases > Business Development > Pre Engineering > Engineering > Transition > Support

The Support Phase is basically about dealing with change request requests to the production environment. Changes are classified and escalated according to how urgent they are. Change requests that are not urgent are set as new requirements and should be scheduled to the next release. The milestone for this phase is the determination of resolution for change requests.

Support:

The objective of the Support workflow is to respond to incoming support requests from users, to identify a resolution for the request, and then to oversee the implementation of that resolution. Once the resolution strategy for a given support request has been determined, it then needs to be worked to resolve the actual issue. As mentioned previously, the resolution will typically be composed of a combination of the following strategies:

• The requester needs information.
• The requester needs training.
• The requester needs a software and/or hardware upgrade.
• There is a potential enhancement or problem with the application that needs to be reported.

The resolution is handled according to the strategy determined. Potential defects or enhancements should be analized by a configuration control board.

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Activities

Respond To Request

Objectives: Respond to requests and collect information about it.

Steps: Respond to support request. Get information about support request.

Determine Resolution

Objectives: Analyze support request based collected information. Determine resolution for it and communicate requester about resolution expectations.

Steps: Gather information and determine the request priority. Simulate the problem if necessary. Escalate the problem if necessary.

Resolve Issue

Objectives: Resolve issue according to resolution that was determined. The issue can be solved by providing information to the requestor.

Steps: Take the appropriate actions to solve the issue. Report the request as a CR when defects or enhancements are identified.

Identify Defects and Enhancements:

The purpose of this workflow is to identify if a problem reported is a defect or an enhancement to the production system. The change requested is categorized according to the information collected by the support team. Corrective or preventive changes are considered defects, on the other hand, adaptive or perfective changes are considered enhancements. If a CR describes a defect, then the source of the defect needs to be determined, if possible. When it is reported a critical defect that is breaking a feature of the system and it so urgent to solve the issue that it cannot be scheduled for the next release then the defect should be corrected on site. Otherwise, the change should be scheduled for the next release. Urgent modifications that are performed on the production environment need to be synchronized with the staging environment so it is not overriden by by new changes.

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Activities

Analyze Change Request

Objectives: Analyze change request to determine if problem reported is a defect or enhancement to the system and try to identify the source of the problem.

Steps: Analyze configuration items. Determine type of change.

Prioritize Changes

Objectives: Prioritize configuration items to be handled in the appropriate order.

Steps: Determine priority scale. Prioritize changes. Critical and urgent defects that break a system's feature should be resolved on site.

Allocate Changes

Objectives: Allocate change to a specific release so it is deployed in the production environment.

Steps: Determine configuration items that will be affected by changes requested. Determine impacts of changes and how feasible are them. Schedule changes. Inform requester about the change allocation.