2014 Volume 16 Issue 5 Pages 35-39
With the slowdown of enterprise IT spending, it is getting harder to win a new system integration contract. In order to reinforce the relationship with an existing client and secure business opportunities, it is essential to deliver satisfactory maintenance services after a systems delivery. During the long term maintenance phase of a large scale system, your client is supposed to request various system improvements, which may spread from a simple functional change to overall transformation. However, the human resources should be minimized due to severe cost reduction pressure from the client. In many cases, a limited number of experts maintain the whole aging system, which often causes human errors especially in analyzing the impact of the system changes. In order to ensure the service quality, you must grasp all the client requirements and their attributes, and comprehensively manage them. This approach will enable appropriate resource allocation and suitable risk management. It is also effective to redefine and visualize all the work process, which may have been obsolescent during the long maintenance phase, to avoid excess dependence to the individual skills. In the reference case in this report, we redefined the upper process of the system improvements. For "Requirements Definition Phase", consistent criteria were developed to identify the attributes of the requirements, and a guideline to determine quality assurance level based on the attributes. Furthermore, "Impact Analysis Phase" and its work process were newly created to track how the impacts were judged based on what input. In this case, the appraisal of the service quality was drastically improved. The approaches introduced here are reusable in terms of how risk and impact could be visualized for evaluation, and will be good references for any organization which provides applications maintenance services.
