Beyond B.A.U.



Application Support , BAU, Maintenance – whatever you call them, these costs are a fact of life in all IT organizations. Essential to keeping applications up to date and customers happy, the support budget can contain hidden waste that holds the business back from pursuing new opportunities.

strategicsupport

SCRUMmasters can show you how to tap into the hidden potential of your support operation and redirect your budget to fund enhancements that drive business growth.

Support workstreams can be complex to manage; with requests coming in from all directions: customers, the sales force, new development projects, regulators and defects. 

At SCRUMmasters, we’ve drawn on our experience with Agile and Lean methodologies and crafted a solution that will turn your application support team into a competitive asset, while reducing overall support costs by 30%-75%.

We do this by addressing the root causes of chaos:

  • Multiple competing request streams
  • Overload of in-process work
  • Peaks and troughs in demand
  • Waiting for external dependencies
  • Insufficient root cause analysis
  • Tactical fixes that reduce system maintainability

    • First, we shift the focus of the support organization toward managing the flow of business value through the support team.

    Next, we work with your teams to optimize the support operation, reducing costs while accelerating the flow of value.

    Finally, we focus your team on reducing the volume of support requests. We introduce continuous quality improvement practices, conduct root-cause analysis for common requests and identify opportunities to reduce and even eliminate these costs.

    The results:

  • Support costs dropped in one organization from 8M to just under 3M over 2 years and are trending lower
  • The support team becomes a place where results-oriented people want to work
  • Over 35% reduction in support ticket volume
  • Support becomes viewed as a strategic source of business impact
  • Reinvestment of support cost savings into product enhancements that drive business growth