Production Support involves problems, solutions, people, changes, deadlines and all the things that go into making a moment critical…all this when the system is live!! You must have heard about the mechanic who was removing the cylinder heads from the motor of a car when he spotted the famous heart surgeon in his shop standing off to the side, waiting for the service manager to come to take a look at his car.  The mechanic shouted across the garage, “Hello Doctor!! Please come over here for a minute.” The famous surgeon, a bit surprised, walked over to the mechanic. The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag and asked argumentatively, “So doctor, look at this. I also open hearts, take valves out, grind ‘em, put in new parts, and when I finish this will work as a new one. So how come you get the big money, when you and me is doing basically the same work? “The doctor leaned over and whispered to the mechanic….. He said: “Try to do it when the engine is running”.

This is exactly how crucial Production Support is. The support services provided are all during run time. And this calls for a well defined, mature production support management process. At HCL we offer custom production support services over a broad spectrum of technology areas spanning from client server applications, object-oriented software, internet or intranet applications to legacy applications.

The goal of production support is to provide a highly usable and highly available customer system and rapid responses to the user problems; all this while ensuring the system is still available to the other users with undisrupted services. And several activities comprise this goal; a help desk, application level support, hardware support and network support. This goal is our process. All processes have a distinct beginning, middle and end and also comprise a set of process steps. And in all processes in this age of customer centricity, the obvious starting point is mapping these steps out from the customers’ perspective.

 In production support, these steps involve various teams and resources and the responsibilities are very crucial and widely distributed. These steps include – problem management, incidents management, processing of incidents, resolution, root cause analysis and interaction in runtime while the application is live. And these activities at different levels involve various teams like the help desk team, technical support team, the specialist team, application development team and various other teams.  And an effective production support team should be able to capture, report, analyze, track and resolve issues.

But at these times, an organization cannot create value not just by following an effective system but by monitoring and improving the execution of the process steps. This will result in eliminating the need for particular inputs, minimizing the responsibility of the customer, addressing an overlooked step etc..At HCL, this continuous monitoring and improvement has helped us develop a managed services model with well defined SLAs and metrics, increased focus on joint governance and program management, program manager enabling unbiased transition to new model and a minimized customer retained organization.