This is a study of current production support model and see what can be improved.

Roles

• BPS (Business Production Support): The first layer of the production support. The operational problems or known problems can be solved by BPS. For further investigation, the tickets (incidents) will be routed to GPS.
• GPS (Global Production Support): The second layer of production support which is the bridge between BPS and application support teams. BPS is lack of technical knowledge, hence GPS can help BPS to solve some technical problems. Application support teams are focusing on the their applications and busy in detailed investigation, therefore GPS can be the integrated bus of different applications and can be the filter to solve the simple technical problems without routing to application teams.
• TR system (Technical Reference System): A knowledge base which stored the known errors handled before.

Use Cases

• Resolve incident: GPS need collaborate with TR system and application team to resolve the incidents and maintain the TR system. More on quick fix.
• Prevent repeated incident: For preventing the repeated incidents, GPS needs come out a good design with application teams and make change request to Change Management. More on permanently resolve the problem.

Below is the business flow of an incident support

Concerns

• Concerns of BPS: The incident cannot be solved in time; The incident repeats again and again.
• Concerns of GPS: The SLA cannot be met.
• Application support teams: Tedious non-application issues come in.

Our Strengths

1. In physical location, the application engineering & support teams are sitting very closely with the global production support team. The communication is quite efficient. And because of the close relationship, it is an one-minute task to get the answer.
2. The global production support team members come from the  application teams who are the SMEs of the applications already. It is more easier than the onshore partners to solve the technical issues.

What can be improved?

1. TR system, currently it is a manual logging and searching system which is in low efficiency while locating the historical fail cases. It is better to create a case-based reasoning system and perform the searching automatically.
2. Current GPS team is still weak on problem solving, it always route the incidents to application support teams. Though the overall elapse time is within SLA (Service Level Agreement), it still has room to improve. For more efficient response and fixing, GPS team need add value in the problem investigation and solving.

Human Resource Need