Support Activities
Manage the acquisition of custom or commercially available products or services that assist with operating and sustaining the deployed systems.
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Introduction
These support activities can be performed within the context of each technical operations project or as a single project providing support services to many other projects (a CM or QA project). These activities provide support to the management, engineering, and acquisition activities by:
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Managing changes to the IT products and data once they are installed and begin to be used. This establishes the operational baselines, allowing a site to return to a previous operational configuration if needed.
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Objectively reviewing and auditing the processes and products of the technical operations projects to establish expectations about their quality.
For additional insight, refer to the technology fabrication and deployment support activities.
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Activities
The basic fabrication support activities also apply to the operations projects. You may refer to those activities for additional detail. Actions applicable to operations projects are described below:
- Configuration Management Activities. The Configuration Management Team will:
- Periodically review or audit the installed applications (or parts) to ensure that they are consistent with the deployed configuration ( component or packaged solution versions, licensing).
- Periodically establish an operational baseline, such as backing up parts of the system before and after major changes (upgrades, new application versions).
- Manage off-site storage, data protection and other critical resources (logs).
- Track run-time parameter changes (reconfiguring network, database parameters).
- Track and appropriately handle emergency patches made in the field, ensuring that they are reported and used to update the developmental configuration.
- Quality Assurance Activities. The Quality Assurance Team will:
- Review or audit adherence to key operating procedures (backup, network security, user administration).
- Conduct quality appraisals of the installed infrastructure and applications to help determine there effectiveness and efficiency. They should obtain suggestions for improvement (user satisfaction surveys) and publish the results.
Roles and Responsibilities
The key roles and their responsibilities are as follows:
- Configuration Management Team. These individuals have primary responsibility for performing the CM activities for one or more projects.
- Quality Assurance Team. These individuals have responsibility for performing the QA activities for one or more projects.
- Change Control Board. These individuals approve the release of IT products for each site. They also review and approve significant changes to IT products after they are released. Individuals on the Change Control Board may include the IT Decision Makers, the IT Evolution Manager, the HS Program Manager, and other interested parties.
- Other Key Stakeholders. This includes any group or individual with a vested interest in the performance or status of the support activities. Stakeholders may include the Pilot Team, the IT staff, Users, or others who interact with the support personnel. Stakeholders also may include IT Project Manager, the IT Evolution Management Team and other senior managers ( CIO) and technical persons ( Chief Architect). Stakeholders receive insight into the status of these support activities, as necessary, to understand the operational configurations, changes, and overall qualities.
Artifacts
The following information is used or produced by these activities. Templates, examples, and checklists for identifying and documenting these items are available through the Additional Resources section at the end of this page.
- Operational Configuration. This is a major output-the as-used set of IT products and data at a point in time. It may be necessary to go back to these checkpoints in emergencies (a change to an application or part is not backwards-compatible with another application).
- Deployed Configuration. This is a major input to these activities-the initial as-installed set of IT products and data before operational parameters are adjusted.
- IT Archive. When IT items are taken out of service and cannot be immediately destroyed, they will be archived and controlled.
- IT Products and Data. Operational parameters for these items are adjusted (tuned) as part of daily operations (application configurable data).
- Support Plans. All support tasks are managed formally according to their appropriate specialty plans, such as the Configuration Management Plan or the Quality Assurance Plan. These specialty plans augment the overall Operation Project Plans. Project or product requirements allocated to the support tasks are delegated through the support plans.
- A-TARS. Applicable parts of the A-TARS will influence the support activities. The A-TARS: Technology Guidelines may include support-specific practices that QA activities will review or audit.
- Process and Product Evaluations. The results of QA reviews and audits are distributed to the appropriate individuals. Issues that cannot be resolved at the working level are elevated to the operations project and IT Division or other executive management, as necessary.
- Status. Progress and issues are forwarded to the project management activities. Status is checked against the activities in the appropriate Support Plan.
Additional Resources
Resources applicable to this activity are cataloged below. Some items from the fabrication project support resources as well as the deployment project support resources may be used to perform the operations support activities. Lists of all available resources may be found in the Resources portion of the IT Planning and Management Guides.
| Checklist: Technical Operations A tailorable checklist to use for identifying items that may affect operations. 04-16-02 |
| Guidelines: Assess Existing IT Qualities A collection of checklists and guidelines to evaluate the usage and maintenance qualities of the HS Agency's IT. 04-23-01 |