10 Production Support Best Practices

Production support is the process of providing support for software that is in production, or live, use. This includes monitoring and responding to incidents, as well as performing routine maintenance and tasks.

There are a number of best practices that should be followed in order to provide effective production support. In this article, we will discuss 10 of the most important best practices for production support.

1. Define the scope of support

The scope of support defines the parameters of what is and is not supported. This includes defining the software, hardware, environments, and processes that are supported. Defining the scope of support helps to set expectations with customers and stakeholders, and it also helps the production support team to prioritize and triage issues.

Without a clear scope of support, the production support team will be constantly bombarded with requests for help that fall outside of their area of expertise. This can lead to frustration on both sides, as well as decreased productivity.

When defining the scope of support, it’s important to be as specific as possible. The more clarity you can provide, the better.

2. Have a proper escalation matrix

When an issue arises, it’s important to have a clear and concise way to determine who needs to be notified. The last thing you want is for a critical issue to fall through the cracks because no one knew who was supposed to be handling it.

An escalation matrix should spell out exactly who is responsible for what, and how issues should be escalated if they’re not being resolved in a timely manner. This way, everyone knows their role and there’s no confusion about who needs to be contacted when something goes wrong.

3. Document everything

When an issue arises, the first thing you’ll want to do is check your documentation. This will help you understand the issue better and also give you a starting point for troubleshooting. If you don’t have documentation, you’ll have to start from scratch, which can be time-consuming and frustrating.

It’s important to document not only the systems and processes in place, but also the people who are responsible for each task. This way, if there’s ever a question about who should be doing what, you can refer to the documentation.

Finally, keep all of your documentation up to date. As things change, make sure to update your documentation accordingly. This will save you a lot of headaches down the road.

4. Communicate with your customers

Your customers are the ones who use your product or service every day. They know it better than anyone else, and they’re the ones who will be the most affected by any changes or problems with the product.

That’s why it’s so important to keep them in the loop. If there are any changes or problems with the product, they need to be the first to know. And if you’re working on a fix, they need to know that, too.

The best way to communicate with your customers is to have a dedicated customer support team. This team should be responsible for handling all customer communication, from answering questions to providing updates on product changes.

If you don’t have a dedicated customer support team, you should at least have a designated point of contact for your customers. This person should be responsible for keeping your customers updated on everything that’s going on with the product.

No matter how you do it, communication with your customers is essential for production support.

5. Use tools to automate and hone your processes

When you’re dealing with production systems, there’s always the potential for something to go wrong. And when things do go wrong, you need to be able to fix them quickly and efficiently. That’s where automation comes in.

Automation can help you speed up your processes and make them more reliable. For example, you can use automation to deploy new code to your servers or to run tests before code is deployed.

Tools can also help you track down problems more quickly. For example, if you’re having trouble with a particular server, you can use a tool like New Relic to get detailed information about what’s going on with that server.

Using tools to automate and improve your processes is an essential best practice in production support.

6. Deploy smaller releases, progressively to ensure your changes go well

When you make a change to your code or configuration, it’s hard to predict how that will affect the system as a whole. By deploying smaller changes progressively, you can mitigate the risk of a change causing an unexpected outage or performance degradation.

This also allows you to quickly roll back a change if something does go wrong. Rather than having to undo a large number of changes at once, you can simply revert the most recent change and then investigate the issue further.

Finally, deploying smaller changes progressively is just good practice for making changes in general. It’s always best to make small, incremental changes rather than making large, sweeping changes all at once.

7. Treat ITIL as guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules

ITIL, or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a set of best practices for IT service management that has been adopted by organizations around the world. While ITIL can be extremely helpful in standardizing and improving production support processes, it’s important to remember that every organization is different and that not all of the ITIL best practices will be relevant or applicable in every situation.

Instead of blindly following all of the ITIL best practices, take the time to assess which ones make sense for your organization and which ones you can safely ignore. This will help you streamline your production support processes and make them more efficient and effective.

8. Prioritize collaboration

When an issue arises in production, it’s crucial to have all the relevant stakeholders involved in solving the problem as quickly as possible. This includes developers, ops staff, and any other team members who might be able to provide insights or assistance.

The goal is to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, with minimal impact to the business. To do this, everyone needs to be on the same page, working together towards a common goal.

This can be a challenge, as different teams often have different priorities and ways of working. However, it’s important to remember that the goal is to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, with minimal impact to the business. This should be the priority for everyone involved.

9. Take advantage of chaos and resilience engineering

Chaos and resilience engineering are all about purposely introducing chaos into your system in order to test its limits and find weaknesses that need to be addressed. By doing this, you can make your system more resilient to unexpected failures.

This may sound counterintuitive, but it’s actually a very effective way to improve your production support. By deliberately causing failures and then fixing them, you can make your system stronger and more resistant to future problems.

So if you’re looking for ways to improve your production support, don’t shy away from chaos and resilience engineering. Embrace it and use it to your advantage.

10. Choose tools that are familiar to and embraced by your development teams

If you’re using a tool that developers are already comfortable with, they’re more likely to actually use it when they encounter an issue in production. If they’re not familiar with the tool, they’re less likely to want to use it, and they may even try to avoid it altogether.

This is why it’s so important to choose tools that will be easy for your development teams to use. Not only will they be more likely to use them, but they’ll also be more likely to actually find and fix issues when they occur.