Managing production support items alongside other types of work in an Agile team presents a unique set of challenges that can often feel like juggling multiple spinning plates. Agile teams are designed to be adaptable, focusing on iterative development and continuous improvement. However, production support requires immediate attention and quick problem-solving to maintain system stability and customer satisfaction. Balancing these conflicting priorities demands strategic planning, effective communication, and a robust framework to ensure that neither innovation nor operational efficiency is compromised. In this article, we delve into the complexities of this balancing act and explore practical solutions to help Agile teams manage production support seamlessly alongside their other critical tasks.
Scrutinizing Incoming Requests: Triage for Better Prioritization
One effective action Agile teams can take to manage production support items more efficiently is to carefully scrutinize each incoming request to determine its true nature. Often, what appears to be a production support item might actually be a new feature request disguised as an urgent issue. By implementing a triage process, teams can categorize and prioritize requests accurately.
This involves asking critical questions to assess whether the item in question is genuinely impacting system functionality or user experience in a significant way, or if it is merely a feature enhancement that could be scheduled for a future sprint. Distinguishing between these types of work helps teams allocate their resources more effectively, ensuring that genuine production issues receive the immediate attention they require, while feature requests are prioritized based on strategic value and planned into the workflow accordingly.
Optimizing Workflow: Streamlining Production Support Processes
Another option is to examine and optimize the workflow your team is following for handling production support items or a specific subset of them. Consider experimenting with changes to the workflow to enhance efficiency and responsiveness. For example, if your current process involves estimating the work for all production support items, try removing the estimation step to streamline the process.
Alternatively, you could introduce a new board layout or create a separate board dedicated to a particular class of production support items. Incorporate a swimlane specifically for (Expedite) items to ensure that urgent issues are easily identifiable and receive the immediate attention they require. These adjustments can help improve the team’s ability to manage production support items more effectively, maintaining a balance between addressing urgent issues and continuing with planned development work.
Analyzing Patterns: Identifying Common Issues and Their Impact
Another powerful approach (and my personal favorite) in managing production support items is to analyze the landscape of existing issues to identify patterns and commonalities. Start by performing some simple data analysis to categorize production support items into common types, or “buckets” (I’m looking at you my fellow Excel nerds.) For example, you might find recurring issues related to user errors, system bugs, configuration problems, or user requests. Rank these buckets in terms of their frequency and impact to determine which types are consuming the most resources and causing the most disruption.
Once you have this data, facilitate a brainstorming session with your team to explore ways to reduce the occurrence of items in the highest-ranked bucket. Encourage the team to think creatively and consider a variety of solutions, such as building a self-service portal to empower users to resolve common issues on their own, conducting training sessions to address frequent user errors, or even delegating certain types of support tasks to another team better suited to handle them.
Implementing Solutions: Experimenting with Strategies to Reduce Support Burden
After identifying potential solutions, conduct experiments to test your hypotheses. Implement small-scale changes and monitor their impact on the volume and nature of production support items. If you are practicing SAFe, the IP Sprint (Innovation & Planning Sprint) is an excellent opportunity to do this type of work, especially if the experiment will require the expertise of someone from another team. This iterative approach allows you to validate which strategies are effective and adjust your tactics accordingly, ultimately helping to reduce the burden of production support on your Agile team and freeing up more capacity for strategic work.
Conclusion: Taking a Strategic Approach to Production Support
Regardless of the actions you choose to employ, it is imperative that you do something. It is a given that the number of production support items for a system in development will increase. With new features come new failure modes. Simply attempting to “work harder” is not sustainable. Instead, take a more strategic approach to managing these items by working to find root causes and addressing them. Doing so can help stem the deluge of work that comes from production systems and make it a little more manageable over time.
