Production Support Sits at the Nexus of Multiple Powerful Forces

~ by Randy Wagner

Each department wants to see their outstanding technical debt resolved. And they want to respond to the market with new or updated functionality. And they want to see new production defects resolved. Oh, and vendors may change their integrations. IT leadership wants to streamline systems. It can be a bit like juggling differently weighted objects—while riding a unicycle—in a tornado. The trick is to shield the team from the winds and smooth out the imbalances.

How to Navigate the Competing Demands of Production Support

The path is tricky. IT management wants to maintain good relations with the various business departments. The Product Owners and Scrum Masters must shoehorn the work into sprints that are often structured six months to a year in advance. The team would like to enjoy well-earned vacations or take time for skill upgrading. Some tasks are eight or even 13-point monsters, while others are low or medium priority, but getting long in the tooth.

Solving this constantly changing puzzle and adjusting each sprint to balance appropriately is challenging. Luckily, there are tools available to help.

1 – Margin to Keep Sprints Predictable

The first tool is Margin. You can look at the previous defects that have come in from production to get a sense of how much of any given sprint you need to hold close to resolve Severity 1 or 2 issues. Maybe your top-notch people are pulled offline to solve the problem immediately, or maybe just within the current sprint, but it’s going to take away from what you would otherwise accomplish in the sprint. That’s something a Prod Support team can define and enforce without business pushing back too hard. Combined with the team capacity, it sets the view limits, like looking through a pair of binoculars on the limits of what work could be accomplished.

2 – Prioritization to Prevent Burnout and Delivery Failure

Prioritization is the second tool. Every item, regardless of severity, needs its priority defined. This provides the depth in your view so you know what to attack first. It’s best for business to set that priority but, if necessary, the PO has to be the backstop. Without a priority, everything is the priority, which is a fast way to team burnout and delivery failure. Ideally, you can work with the business and the Product Owner to group items in the backlog and set feature-level priority to maximize efficiency while touching and testing code.

3 – Service Level Agreements to Set Boundaries

The third tool is Service Level Agreements (SLAs). As in any healthy relationship, you have to set clear boundaries. We have only so much time in the sprint, less the margin, to accomplish the work and, as noted above, not everything can be a priority. Defining the SLAs helps with Margin and Prioritization. If we know Form changes have a three week window and a sense of how much Form work comes through regularly, we can set both Margin and Priority accordingly for upcoming sprint content. Business can have some confidence in when they will get items without overextending the team.

These 3 Tools Create a Compass to Help Keep the Team on Track

The three tools, Margin, Priority, and SLA’s, create a sort of compass to allow the team to perform predictably as the various winds push and pull from every angle. It provides the necessary push-back against the business when they want another rush item. While they don’t solve all the issues, they do allow the Production Team to keep the boat upright and maintain heading in the storm.

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Randy Wagner is Director of Quality Assurance for CastleBay Companies. He has 20 years of consulting experience across private and public sectors, Guidewire InsuranceSuite, InsuranceNow, and Duck Creek, with specializations in quality assurance, project management, configuration management, and automation.