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| Methodology |
| Prospering Amid Change |
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The organizations have to invest in core new developments to
keep themselves ahead in the highly competitive industry. At the same time they
have to keep supporting the existing systems as the benefit and value of any new system to an organization
is only as good as its effective management and support. The constraint is skilled
resources. Globalcase realizes this and hence provides unique cost-effective
solutions so that organizations can focus on their core business while it will
keep supporting their existing applications.
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| Globalcase Methodology |
It defines a four step KICK process for providing system support and maintenance. The steps are
a) Knowledge Transition
b) Infrastructure Setup
c) Continuous Support and Maintenance
d) Keep improvising
The complete support cycle is executed utilizing the resources from onsite and offshore. The distribution of resources
and the time span of each step depends on who developed the application.
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| Knowledge Transition |
The purpose of this phase is to understand the business processes, process flows, user domains, size & complexity of the application,
Organization policies, guidelines & standards etc.
Globalcase has highly experienced resources from various business domains like Airline, Retail, Manufacturing and
Finance. It utilizes these resources to understand the specific needs of the organization quickly.
In case Globalcase was part of the original development team, the time spent in this phase could be significantly
reduced. It would retain the original developers as part of the support team. In case offshore was part of the development
process, the number of resources could be significantly reduced for onsite making the support more cost effective.
When Globalcase is not part of the original development team it provides knowledge transition plan based on various factors like
size, complexity, user domains, internationalization etc. It also prepares a resource plan for staffing the resources at
onsite and offshore at this step. The goal of the plan is to reduce the number of onsite resources gradually and take more work
to offshore.
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| Infrastructure Setup |
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The purpose of this step is to setup infrastructure so that support and maintenance can be provided. This involves establishing
link between onsite and offshore (Globalcase has an existing dedicated link between USA and India), setting up additional
hardware environment if required, installing required software, finalizing the team to provide the support, providing
required access authorization to these resources etc. This step can be performed in parallel with Knowledge Transition step
after getting an initial overall understanding of the system.
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| Continuous Support and Maintenance |
This is an ongoing step. This step starts after completion of first two steps.
Globalcase has classified the complete support and maintenance service into corrective maintenance and adoptive
maintenance. The corrective maintenance involves giving quick fixes / work-around to the production problem.
Adoptive maintenance involves upgrading the system with new / additional requirements. It enters into a service
level agreement (SLA) with the customer for both type of activities.
The process for corrective maintenance is: a) Receive the problem report b) Analyze the problem report
c) Determine if a quick solution or work around is possible d) Document the possible impacts and preventive measures
e) Apply the fix / workaround f) Archive the problem report for further analysis g) Update all concerned on the
status of the problem report h) Close the problem report i) Follow the escalation guidelines as per the defined
process and SLA.
The adoptive maintenance request may originate from the users and other stake holders or from problem reports.
The users or other stake holders may initiate a request because of change in business processes or for new features.
In case a work around was applied for a problem as the fix would have taken more time, it goes for adoptive
maintenance. The analysis of a reported problem may lead to finding a better solution. This may initiate an adoptive
maintenance request. All adoptive maintenance requests are logged in a central repository. These requests are
prioritized in consultation with customer. Globalcase analysts provide cost, effort and impact analysis report
for these requests. Once a request is approved it goes through analysis, solution design, coding, unit testing,
integration testing and finally it's implemented in production. The developers monitor the implemented change for next
few days to make sure that application is running fine.
The staffing of the onsite and offshore team depends on who developed the application and criticality of the application.
Globalcase distributes the team appropriately based on these factors. As the team gets more experienced in supporting the
application, more work is delegated to offshore. This helps in reducing the number of onsite resources and the overall
support and maintenance cost.
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| Keep Improvising |
This is an ongoing step, which runs in parallel with the Continuous Support and Maintenance step. Globalcase collects
different statistics and analyzes those. This helps in monitoring the health of the application and taking preventive
measures proactively. Some of the statistics collected are:
Service Quality: Acknowledgment Time = Avg. Time taken for Support person to Acknowledge User’s Call
First-Second Fix Ratio: Number of Requests answered by Primary Support/ Number of Request Answered by Secondary Support
, in case of escalations.
Fix Quality: Number of Defective fixes reported by Customer
Backlog Management Index: Number of Closed Problems/ (Number of Closed + Number of Open Problems)
The analysts perform causal analysis for each of the problem reported. This helps in determining the root cause
and taking action so that the problem does not happen again. This ensures a stable system in
the long run.
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