Define Roles and Responsibilities for Support

Use

To define roles and responsibilities in support, including:

·         Application support

-         Role: to manage the business processes and implement changes in them (bug fixes and new change requests)

-         Responsibilities: for each business process, define a process champion from the functional department. In case of major problems with the business process, the process champion is the contact person.

·         Development support

-         Role: to work closely with the application and system management support teams

-         Responsible for development maintenance (bug fixing) and new developments

·         Program scheduling management

-         Roles: normally a virtual team that includes members of the application team and the Software and System Management team

-         Responsible for scheduling, monitoring, and error handling of background jobs

·         Software and system management

-         Role can be performed by one or more teams in the same or different organizations

-         Responsibilities cover all activities (monitoring, error handling, performance management) for all the technical components in the solution landscape

·         Helpdesk or user support

-         Role: primary interface between users and the support organization

-         Responsible for classifying and dispatching the problems to the right parts of the organization. In some cases, the helpdesk can solve minor issues (such as resetting passwords).

Prerequisites

·         Solution management strategy

·         Business requirements

·         Hours of operation

·         Organizations involved in support

·         Scope of the solution

Procedure

1.       Identify the scope of the solution to be supported, including:

-         Technical components such as hardware, network, operating systems, databases, and software components

-         Business processes,such as mySAP CRM Mobile Sales and Internet Sales

2.       Identify teams involved in supporting the solution, including:

-         Application support

-         Development support

-         Program scheduling management

-         Software and system management

-         Helpdesk or user support

3.       Define roles and responsibilities at team level.

-         If you have an outsourcing provider, they may want to do this internally.

4.       Define SLAs and deliverables for each team.

5.       Define communication between the teams, including:

-         Regular meetings

-         Standard communication

-         Escalation procedures

Result

Support organization defined