Complex IT Project Management: 16 Steps to Success

11.4 Support Requirements

From a project management perspective, three classes of support requirements are used: business as usual (BAU), customized BAU, and totally customized support. BAU requirements are, of course, the most desirable class because they are a known quantity and probably the least painful to leverage on your project's behalf. The most common example is network infrastructure. Let us say you build out a new office building into which you are moving thousands of users. From a network perspective you are going to build a LAN inside the building to give users access to file and print services. The LAN will then attach to the corporate network, normally through dedicated bandwidth connected to the corporate backbone. This link will provide users with access to corporate computing services, such as applications and data resident on servers or mainframes located elsewhere and e-mail, of course. The support requirements for your building are going to be:

• Managing the routers that connect the building to the Internet or corporate backbone (the wide area network [WAN])

• Managing the hubs or switches that connect local users, servers, and printers to the LAN

• Monitoring these components for outages and throughput degradation

• Supporting moves, adds, or changes within the building that involve network-attached devices

• Coordinating network carrier activities (i.e., the phone company providing the leased lines from the building out to the "cloud")

• Some involvement in protocol or address management that controls user access to local or global computing resources

11.4.1 BAU Support Requirements

For these BAU support requirements, there is a 100 percent probability that infrastructure and process are already in place. Your telecom or networking department has standard monitoring tools, change control processes, and a field team that must accommodate your new site in the example being followed. That may require expansion because this is a new site, but basically they will inform you of specific requirements your project needs to fund and manage through implementation. This will include their specifying the design of the LAN and WAN devices, protocols, and speeds (e.g., gigabit Ethernet). For this type of project, support customization is rare.

11.4.2 Customized BAU Support

The second class of support requirements is BAU plus some customization. An excellent example of this type of project is a firm-wide upgrade of LAN servers network operating system (NOS) to a more current version. Although a support infrastructure is in place in the legacy version, pending upgrades to the more current NOS version may be new to your company. If that is the case, your support requirements will include:

• A certification process to validate that all new servers are hardened per corporate standards for security, virus protection, and so on; this will also probably include a directive on how the new NOS is to be implemented on the actual servers. These requirements, in my experience, are quite specific, so you cannot simply hire outsiders to gin up these servers for you.

• Training for local LAN administrators

• Training for help desk personnel and technicians, plus specialized troubleshooting processes, need to be implemented if the change to the NOS environment introduces operational support risk, as would be the case if communication, resource management, or authentication protocols change.

• Some application issues can arise from server upgrades to any network operating system, including gateways, terminal emulation, and browsers.

• Customized help desk notification and training may be required in anticipation of increased user complaints. Your pilot testing should be designed to assess this potential support requirement.

11.4.3 Totally Customized Support

The third class of support requirements is total customization. This would be the result of a new technology being rolled out. One common example is the introduction of a self-service payroll reporting system. Let us say that your new system allows employees to log in through the corporate intranet and enter their hours worked and time taken off for sick days or vacation. Supervisors will approve employee submissions and forward them to payroll or human resources (HR) for processing. Because this is a whole new way for your company to do business, a customized support process is required, with the following deliverables:

• A special help line number will be required specifically for this system. It must be staffed around the clock if your firm is global, or at least extended beyond business hours to accommodate telecommuters and road warriors.

• User training is required at rollout time and must be available for future new employees or when features are added to the original system. Common training options are "leader led," a document e-mailed to everyone, or a Web site offering interactive training and help screens.

• If the system is not intuitively easy to use and flexible, manual edit or correction processes may be required. This usually means staffing a Tier II group at the main help desk.

• If a Web site is used as described previously, provisions must be made to maintain that site, keep the content current, and so forth. This may not sound like support, but what else would you call it?