Improvements in application support - update

In late 2008 I worked on and blogged about an initiative to improve our application support function. While that initiative has been successful in implementing a new way of supporting our applications and we are in the process of moving our applications to the new model there is something else that I would like to acknowledge. In addition to testing the changes that I described in my blog post last year we also implemented some large changes in our existing support team to more immediately address the same issues I described in the earlier blog post. These changes entailed streamlining the team and asking them to shift their focus from "fire fighting" to:

1. collaboration and learning
   
2. root cause analysis
   
3. continuous improvement
4. making support a fun place to work
   

The idea was that we had some quality issues with our applications and our application support processes and the quality of service our users were receiving was impacted. We wanted the support team to identify the root causes of those issues and work with our development teams, other support organizations and sponsors to address the issues and make our applications more supportable while also making application support a place where people are happy to work. Well it's been about a year now, the team is in it's fourth "release" and there were some interesting things presented at today's sprint review:

1. the July year over year support ticket volume has decreased by approximately 30%
2. the first item presented by the team was the number of hours of support team member savings per month that were generated by the support and development teams focusing on continuous improvement activities
   
3. support ticket backlogs are higher than the team would like

My observations on these are:

1. the year over year decrease in ticket volume is great progress and validates our hypothesis that we had issues that could be overcome. It also makes me ask the question why can't we reduce an additional 30%, 40% or even more?
   
2. the idea that the amount of person hours savings was the first thing presented by the team confirms that the team has clearly and decisively transitioned from "fire fighting" to a value add team that is focused on making our applications more supportable
3. while support backlogs are higher than the team would like (we did reduce the team size quite a bit) the focus on collaboration, continuous improvement and root cause analysis should not decrease. The long term gains that we see from these efforts (see bullet 1 above) are much greater than any short term blips in support ticket volume increases, especially when we collaborate and communicate effectively with our sponsors and users

Needles to say, both of these initiatives have led to interesting findings on how we perform application support and development and will definitely help us think about how to improve in these areas going forward....and I will keep blogging about it as we progress.