CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Information technology (IT) professionals worldwide are searching for the “next solution” that can save money and improve quality. Applying standardized project management tools and techniques is resulting in handsome dividends on new development projects, yet new projects account for only half of IT professionals’ responsibilities. The other half is running system maintenance. It has been years since we saw the maintenance hype for the Year 2000 cleanup effort. Now is therefore an appropriate time to modify project management tools and techniques so they can serve the business of IT maintenance—the next solution!
Maintenance delivers a service, while projects deliver a product. Basic project management thus does not apply to maintenance. IT Maintenance: Applied Project Management modifies basic project management tools and techniques so they can be used to manage systems maintenance. This book demonstrates proven modified tools and techniques, reasons for using them, and ways to use the concepts presented in the book to lower costs while increasing customer satisfaction. Many Project Management Professionals (PMP®) will recognize the book’s concepts as extensions of PMI®-tested best practices in project management.
Unlike most books published on system maintenance, this book does not focus on the traditional software engineering mindset, on programming, or on code maintainability. Software engineering is still a vital component in system maintenance success, but companies are demanding more return on their investment. The management of software engineering is the component that needs to be improved.
This book takes a fresh look at increasing the value and quality of system maintenance in a straightforward and practical way. You will read about workable approaches to managing the maintenance of IT systems during the heat of battle—approaches that can also serve to lessen the intensity of those battles.
These techniques work. I have taken over system maintenance groups and applied these techniques with remarkable results—staff was decreased by 15%, customer satisfaction was increased, the department’s vice president was happier with the status-reporting format, and my workload actually decreased.
CIO Agenda
Top-notch chief information officers (CIOs) strive for world-class performance and financial discipline. To achieve these goals, they:
• Ensure high-quality operations by meeting availability and other service levels.
• Clearly define accountability.
• Enforce life-cycle management, ensuring legacy systems are fully retired when new systems are deployed.
From the perspective of a CIO, maintenance is just one piece of the larger IT pie. CIOs focus on IT’s close alignment with the business and on its delivering business value. I had the opportunity to interview several CIOs who wanted to find ways to control and lower the annual cost of maintenance so they could shift some financial resources to new development projects that would increase functionality. At the same time, they wanted to increase the quality and speed of the maintenance service they provided in order to raise the level of business value and customer satisfaction.
Directors and managers can use the disciplined approaches and controls in this book. This will align the directors and managers with the CIO agenda. Maintenance managers are in the position to create consistency and ensure that past IT investments deliver the committed return on investment (ROI).
CIOs need to challenge themselves to adopt a new paradigm. They need to reward managers who decrease their staffing levels while increasing quality. This differs from the tendency to reward managers who engage in building ever-larger maintenance staffs. This new paradigm will complete the full alignment to decreasing maintenance costs. It will prevent CIOs from sending mixed messages by decreasing staff in order to create greater cost savings but then rewarding managers with larger staffs.
Leadership
This book’s value is realized only when the tools and techniques presented here are put into practice. Putting them into practice takes leadership. Learning something that you will never use is entertainment. Learning something that you apply is education. The difference between the two takes leadership of the basic level, leadership over your own actions before you can lead others.
Much of what is written in these pages will sound like personnel administration. To an extent, it is. But personnel administration must be competently addressed as a foundation in order to run the maintenance team efficiently and develop leadership skills in managers. This book offers a foundation for running the maintenance team efficiently. That must be done before beginning to manage the effectiveness of the team in meeting business needs and delivering business value. You must have a solid foundation of administration first; then you can build high-quality management on top of it that’s based on leadership.
Figure 1-1: Leadership Requires a Foundation
• Administration is making sure the team is working.
• Management is making sure the team delivers its promises.
• Leadership is making sure the promises are for true business value.
Managers of maintenance teams must develop and demonstrate their leadership, but upper management also needs to demonstrate leadership. Upper management leadership possesses the following characteristics:
• It is measured by its ability to make timely decisions.
• Its commitment is measured by its willingness to fund initiatives and improvements to processes.
• It rewards shrinking maintenance teams, not empire building.
This book takes you far on the path toward building your own leadership triangle. But it is your actions that will determine if you are leading the IT business, managing the effectiveness of your team, or just administering your team.
Book Organization
This book is organized into five parts:
• Initiating Processes
• Planning Processes
• Executing Processes
• Monitoring and Controlling Processes
• Closing Processes
The chapters in each part of the book reference standard project management best practices and present modifications of them that can be used for IT maintenance.
Maintenance can be thought of as groups of processes that are similar to standard project management. Figure 1-2 graphically shows the processes and their interrelationships. This model shows how tightly coupled the processes are to each other. After the Assessing & Closing Processes, the figure shows an arrow going back to the Planning Processes. This is needed because maintenance does not have an end date as projects do.
We will use Figure 1-2 for each of the book’s parts to show what process we will focus on and to reemphasize the interrelationships. Figure 1-3 explodes the model to better illustrate the interrelationships. Initiating is not depicted due to its only authorizing maintenance once.
Figure 1-2: Maintenance Process Groups
Figure 1-3: Maintenance Process Groups Exploded
Included in each part of the book are chapters that define the IT maintenance processes.
Part I: Initiating Processes introduces the subject of maintenance and presents the organization of the book. It focuses on why it is not straightforward to apply project management best practices to IT maintenance, but better to modify project management best practices for maintenance. This will meet the driving interests of CIOs, IT directors, and IT managers.
The last chapter of Part I presents the new challenge of outsourcing, stating the current realities of outsourcing and showing how the contents of this book can help both the interests of executives who are enticed with phenomenal cost savings and the scores of directors on down who are fearful of losing their jobs.
Part II: Planning Processes presents the initial planning needed to run effective maintenance. Starting with the IT department-level hierarchy and how maintenance fits into the organization, we weave through Scope of Maintenance, providing a detailed process flow graphic of everything a maintenance team performs and delivers along with the task interactions, then explain each task in detail. This includes the master scope document, the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Next we provide multiple methods of estimating the annual cost and number of team members needed to provide the maintenance service, plan the transition from new development to maintenance, and mitigate the risk of maintenance by effective use of key documentation.
Part III: Executing Processes presents the normal work that the customer or end user actually sees and appreciates. Your team performs most of the Executing Processes while you, the manager, perform most of the Controlling Phase in the next part. Starting with the setup of maintenance, we cover the five steps needed for having the resources available to perform the maintenance work and, if employees are not available, provide the considerations and steps to obtain contractors to fill the roles, including legal considerations for keeping contractors engaged for an indefinite period. On the licensing and contract management side, we provide the considerations for establishing and managing licenses and contracts related to the maintenance team.
The remainder of the Executing Processes part presents the data tracking tool, a key tool for managing and tracking all the work of the maintenance team including being able to mine the data for trends, recurring problems, and performance statistics. It provides steps to develop and maintain a positive relationship with the customer to answer the question, “what have you done for me lately?” Then it presents the complete testing methodology focusing on defect fixes and enhancements.
Part IV: Controlling Processes shows what the manager focuses on after the maintenance team is underway. Part IV describes the activities that are necessary for effectively controlling maintenance and ensuring objectives and quality goals are met. It presents the classic project management change control but with a twist related to maintenance work to handle the significantly large amount of change requests for maintenance. This includes controlling how to manage the multitude of enhancements to the systems as mini-projects, and great urgency on fixing production defects (bugs).
The Controlling Processes part presents Configuration Management for maintaining confidence that the system pieces both are managed effectively and can be rebuilt to match production versions. It presents Cost Control on how to track and categorize both fixed and labor costs to mine a wealth of information that can be used for process improvement, potentially decreasing staff needs, and communicating a clear picture to the customer. It presents the metrics needed to capture the essence of the service being provided by the maintenance team as well as the categories of production incidents, and the reasons these categories are important. It offers team management ideas on how to achieve the goal of delighting the customer through the following four areas: team motivation, team rewards, cross-training, and performance monitoring.
Communication planning includes specifics that differ from projects to develop a strong relationship with the stakeholders that last many years. Developing a Political Plan offers ways to increase your success as a politically savvy manager.
Part IV presents the application of traditional project management risk management with examples of risks specific to maintenance.
Part V: Assessing and Closing Processes provides four suggestions to provide you a retrospective look at your past maintenance effort. The first two are evaluations of your maintenance team, one showing the power of periodic reviews, either formal or informal peer reviews, and the other an approach to prepare for and participate in the dreaded audit.
Lastly, the other assessment is a systematic approach for soliciting customers for feedback on the delivered service, while simultaneously delivering information on the service to the customer. The last chapter presents the activities to close out the fiscal year and begin anew, including: financial closeout, appraising team member performance, applying lessons learned sessions, and updating/renewing the Service Level Agreement.
How to Effectively Use This Book
The book’s organization is designed to help you learn what you need to learn—when you need to learn it. Most of the chapters can stand by themselves and you do not need to have read the previous chapter. Because the book is set up this way, you can determine the best way to meet your immediate needs: You can read this book cover to cover to learn the entire suite of improvements or you can pick the subjects that are of immediate concern for your company’s maintenance organization.
The book’s parts are organized in a logical progression, mirroring the steps in maintenance from start to finish. However, you may not be planning and setting up a maintenance team. You may be taking over an existing team with specific management issues; therefore, it makes perfect sense to jump into the part of the book that addresses your issue. If you are not aware of any specific issues, you may want to start reading the last part of the book, Part V, Assessing and Closing Processes, to assess the past year and then jump to the beginning to start planning anew.