Are you directly or indirectly involved in the development of a web or system application? Whether you’re an application user, a software developer, a QA tester, or a system architect, your organization can benefit from implementing application support processes.
If your team is in charge of managing and supporting all applications within the office environment, what do you all do when there is a problem or bug with the application?
Is there a predefined process in place whereby everyone knows exactly what they need to do in order to solve the problem?
Without a proper application support process, the following issues might occur:
- Two or more people are working on the same application problem.
- Even worse, no one is working on the problem.
- Problems have been fixed but users are not notified.
- Application problems pile up as solving one creates another.
It’s very likely that the CTO or IT Head of your organization will ask for someone to come up with an application support process quickly so that everyone within the IT team knows who needs to work on what.
Sometimes, an application support process is also useful for people using IT systems. When IT users are aware of what goes on within the IT team, they usually become more understanding leading to:
- Fewer requests for unreasonable changes.
- Expecting changes to be made within a few days instead of a few minutes.
- Treating the software developers nicer. 🙂
If you have been given the role to develop an application support process for your organization, do check out Creately.
Creately is an online diagramming application that’s built for collaboration.
With Creately, you can easily create an application support process based on an already developed template just like the one below:
Since Creately has already created this for us as a template, we can either choose to adopt the stated processes or modify the flow accordingly. It has saved us so much time as compared to creating one from scratch with Microsoft Word. See this video below on the effort it takes to create a process flowchart with Microsoft Word.
Since this process flowchart is created online, you can easily send it to your application developers, support team, and even the CTO for them to discuss and approve. Do note that all process flowcharts should be discussed and agreed upon by all stakeholders before they are officially published.
If your application support team currently does not have an application support process flowchart yet, head on over to Creately to create one today!