Operation/Support Process: Why it is most important?
In my previous blog, I discussed the Technology Culture in Start-up. Here I am going to discuss why support operation Processes are important.
For an organization to run effectively and efficiently, all operations need to be streamlined and monitored professionally. To define this they must have the operation management principle set correctly and must be followed by the supporting units like product management, software development, sales etc. Efficient operations are key drivers for the success of any project, product and even for the entire organization.
Enterprise always starts with the defined vision and mission. Vision must be supported by the guidelines and principles. These principles should be defined for various levels i.e.:
• Enterprise principles
• Architecture and development principles
• Operation management principles
• Employee management principles
If these principles are not defined entire project will go haywire. Organizations generally work on an agile model but forget about the principle they need to set up or even set principle are being ignored.
Following areas must be properly incorporated by any Organisation/project/product.
- A complete capability assessment must be carried out prior to starting the project for the operations viewpoint.
- Principles and guidelines must be laid out for the operations team and it should also cover all the touchpoints which are affecting the operations.
- While defining the product specification product managers must create the business scenario from the viewpoint of support/operation teams as well.
- With this viewpoint, Architects must incorporate the required architecture in order to perform the support and operations team.
- Development and implementation team must include the appropriate tools for supporting.
- Sales and Business teams must comply with the guidelines wherever they are playing an actor.
- Most important operations team must be set up in every organization be it a small or large organization. Which must have the following levels of support
— L1 Support — Manuals, helps videos etc.
— L2 Support — Support team who can assist at the call, chat, mail etc.
— L3 Support — Dedicated technical support team who can debug and support L2 and customer.
- All compliance processes must be defined carefully for the business otherwise it can lead to financial, reputational loss and legal issues.
I will give some practical examples or established product organization where some/all of the above points are missing.
- In one of the implementation, I have observed that support personals do not have the process of proper maintenance of the system. Tools and process were not defined to archive and purge the data and at one day space was full this leads to the problem of a system down.
- Another example where operations GUI was not given to the operations team and they were manually updating the database using the scripts. This creates problems on multiple fronts, where operations team forgot the alter the scripts and ran multiple times and corrupt the production data. After efforts data was restored but took time and the system was done for some time which results in financial, reputational loss. In the same example data which has been updated from backend do not have a proper audit trail and which compliance it is problem.
- Same and repeated manual effort makes the operations team lazy and sometimes they oversight the actual errors.
I will give some practical examples of start-up product where some/all points are missing.
- Most start-ups assume that there is no need for operations teams.
- Sometimes if they employ the support team they employ one or two resources who could be callers only who are passing the entire details to the technical team.
- If the process is not defined and the sales team has carried out some promises to a customer which is not known to the operations team it can lead to dissatisfied customer.
- If compliance issues are not dealt with it can lead to a shutdown of the business or can affect business adversely: For example GPDR, KYC etc.
- Generally, in many of the start-up team think of “Jugaad” in each and everything where they want the users to comfort but usability is not every aspect of product/project, there are many factors which needs to be thought through carefully.
In the end, I would like to suggest that the organization must take operations as an important driver for the success of a project/product/business.
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