24X7 IT support from offshore

Out of the curiosity, I wanted to know what are the activities/phases involved in the maintenance/support project say 24 X 7 projects especially from offshore. Most of the big boys in IT industry serve lot of maintenance contracts. So, it is really good for us to know about that side of IT world. I will mainly focus on the support delivered by the offshore team.

Once RFP is made and customer and IT Company agreed to be in contract, first stage is Due Diligence.

Due Diligence:
In this stage, basically onsite people try to understand the applications which need to be supported. They will have lot of sessions with the customer in order to prepare due diligence documents. It is expected that lot of information is captured in these documents. The information includes lot of things like: technology used for the applications, number of FTEs required, current number of FTEs handling applications, data regarding history tickets raised so far for the applications etc.

Knowledge Transfer:
Once the team is identified, second phase of the contract gets kick started. Knowledge transfer phase typically involve lot of conference calls, live meetings, webex etc. In this phase, customers/SMEs will typically run the offshore team through the applications, application code (depending on what kind tier support is mentioned in the contract like tier-1/2/3/4) End of this phase will make sure that offshore guys are aware of the applications, technologies involved in the contract.

Shadow Support:
Once the Shadow support is started, offshore team solves some percentage of the actual tickets with the help of onsite people and the customer team. Typically, this percentage is between 10-20. The main objective of this phase is to make offshore team aware of the processes and the ways followed to actually solve the tickets with the help of onsite people.

Primary Support:
In this phase, offshore team solves all the tickets without taking much help from the SMEs/customer contact person. Offshore team will come up with the solutions of the tickets and then takes confirmation from the SME to solve it. One important thing to remember here is SME/customer contact person is still available onsite if any help/information/pointers are required by the offshore team to solve the tickets.

Steady State:
This is the final stage, where all the applications mentioned in the contract are completely supported by the offshore team. SMEs need not be required to be present henceforth.

There are so many different models exercised by IT vendors. Some of them will have few people onsite as well to support tier-1 and offshore team will support tier2, 3 and 4. Also, SLAs need to be clearly defined and should be followed strictly. There is whole lot of escalation matrix as well. For project managers, best part would be effort estimations for the support projects. They will have to rely on historical tickets data and in case where historical ticket data is not available then assumptions needs to be done. There are various parameters as well for such assumptions.

I also want to add that I am in the development field only and I have neither switched to support nor I plan to do so in near future. :)

Cheers,
Amol