Technical Support Management

Support Planning: Service & Support should have resource(s) to work with the R&D team in the formal product development and release process to assure support’s view of the customer is provided as input into the product. This should include subjects like product Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) features/functions. It will also include prioritization of defect fixes in a release.

This group is also best positioned to develop the Support Readiness plan for new product releases. Assuring that documentation, training curriculum are adequate, and are reviewed by subject matter experts for comprehension and accuracy.

Product Life Cycles: Service & Support should work with R&D Product Management to define the product life cycle policy for all products. This includes agreement on the definition of release level strategy and content. Examples would include, patch releases, formal maintenance releases, major functional enhancement releases, and new product releases. A key issue, particularly in enterprise customers is the length of time that a release will be supported after a newer release is shipped. The support period needs to include sustaining engineering resource to fix new priority 1 defects in patch releases, for example. Sustaining Engineering: Service and Support needs to agreement with R&D on who has the resource and responsibility for bug fixing, patch releases and maintenance releases for all products. This can be managed by either or shared. However it is managed, it needs to be responsive to the need to provide emergency, fast turnaround fixes, to security issues, system failure defects, etc.  For Software products see more detail.

Special Assignments: Two way special assignments between Service & Support and R&D is an effective way to improve the customer view of products between organizations. By having advanced support engineers working in R&D on product Q&A, special development projects, specification or code reviews, are ways to informally provide R&D with support input, and for support engineers to get early exposure and involvement with a product prior to release.