Streamline Application Maintenance
Effective maintenance ensures the long-term value of your applications.
- Application maintenance teams are accountable for the various requests and incidents coming from a variety business and technical sources. The sheer volume and variety of requests create unmanageable backlogs.
- The increasing complexity and reliance on technology within the business has set unrealistic expectations on maintenance teams. Stakeholders expect teams to accommodate maintenance without impact on project schedules.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Improving maintenance’s focus and attention may mean doing less but more valuable work. Teams need to be realistic about what can be committed and be prepared to justify why certain requests have to be pushed down the backlog (e.g. lack of business value, high risks).
- Maintenance must be treated like any other development activity. The same intake and prioritization practices and quality standards must be upheld, and best practices followed.
Impact and Result
- Justify the necessity of streamlined maintenance. Gain a grounded understanding of stakeholder objectives and concerns, and validate their achievability against the current state of the people, process, and technologies involved in application maintenance.
- Strengthen triaging and prioritization practices. Obtain a holistic picture of the business and technical impacts, risks, and urgencies of each accepted maintenance requests in order to justify its prioritization and relevance within your backlog. Identify opportunities to bundle requests together or integrate them within project commitments to ensure completion.
- Establish and govern a repeatable process. Develop a maintenance process with well-defined stage gates, quality controls, and roles and responsibilities, and instill development best practices to improve the success of delivery.
Application Maintenance
Focus on your SLAs, not costs, for driving your maintenance activities.
This course makes up part of the Applications Certificate.
- Course Modules: 5
- Estimated Completion Time: 1 hour
- Featured Analysts:
- Cole Cioran, Senior Director, Application Practice
- Ben Mackle, Consultant Analyst, Application Practice
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 4-phase advisory process. You'll receive 8 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Understand Your Maintenance Priorities
- Call 1: Discuss the business and technical priorities that are motivating you to optimize your maintenance practice.
- Call 2: Discuss the issues, constraints, and opportunities of your maintenance practice.
Guided Implementation 2: Instill Maintenance Governance
- Call 1: Review your application maintenance target-state roles, responsibilities, and process.
- Call 2: Review your metrics to gauge success.
Guided Implementation 3: Enhance Triaging and Prioritization Practices
- Call 1: Create a prioritization scheme and techniques for maintenance requests.
- Call 2: Discuss a plan to regularly review your backlog and ensure release practices accommodate maintenance.
Guided Implementation 4: Streamline Maintenance Delivery
- Call 1: Discuss your approach to monitor maintenance tasks.
- Call 2: Discuss best practices to enforce quality standards and streamline development and deployment practices.
Contributors
- Alan Page, Principal Application Developer, Los Angeles Country Sheriff’s Department
- Jing Min, Director, Quality Assurance, Information Technology, OMERS
Streamline Application Maintenance
Streamline Application Management