Post this on your bulletin boards, put it in the company newsletter, send out a company-wide notice: Support runs the business. It doesn't matter how mature your program is or how talented your developers are—automations break; they just do. Bugs happen, applications update, whatever the variable may be; these things can upend even our most resilient automations. That is exactly why production support, especially proactive production support, is critical to keeping your business running smoothly and minimizing downtime. Good support enables your program to flourish. Good support ensures optimal customer satisfaction. Good support allows you to explore new technologies.
In the six years since I became the first automator in Global Business Services (GBS) at Boston Scientific (BSC), helping to launch their official automation program, I've experienced ambitious growth and enlightening challenges. As a result, I've become a staunch champion of prioritizing a robust production support framework, team, and best practices.
In hopes of helping you build a better support structure, I want to share some insights from the production support journey at BSC and advice from our lessons learned.
The BSC Production Support Journey
Initially, we focused on growing our automation team and developing our first solutions. Our bandwidth was limited, and with only a few solutions in production, there wasn’t much to support. However, as more solutions were developed, we found that our support monitoring was falling between the cracks. Break-fixes started piling up, slowing down our development of new automations and team growth. We couldn’t continue this way if we wanted a successful, sustainable program.
We began outsourcing monitoring and scheduling thanks to a strategic partnership with a third-party vendor. We hired two resources and immediately observed fewer schedules being missed. However, we still had glaring pain points from the gaps in time zones, and the break-fixes still fell on our development team, diverting them from new initiatives. It still felt like we were taking two steps forward only to take one step back, thus requiring us to reflect again on how to solve our production support problem.
Fast forward to the present when we have now created a tiered production support model to allow for the appropriate progression of issues, provide 21x5 production support by sharing efforts across two global regions and three shifts, and have dedicated resources to perform scheduling, monitoring, and development for break-fixes. I’ll be first to say this model still has plenty of room for improvement, but it is leaps and bounds from where we started and significantly more efficient to help us focus on scaling. The thing we never did was to keep pushing off reforming our support process. We will keep assessing bottlenecks and areas for improvement and that’s what makes all the difference in our program’s maturity and continued success.
Evolve Your Ticketing System
Organizations just starting automation tend to default to a simple email ticketing system to track issues after productionizing their first automations, and BSC was no different. Suddenly, things get much busier, more automations went live, and that informal email ticketing system that was “good enough” isn’t cutting it anymore. For us, issues were getting missed, and no one on the team was exactly thrilled to monitor the shared email inbox in addition to their own. We transitioned to a PowerApp to log tickets, but it still lacked critical features such as SLA tracking and facilitated communication. So, just a few months ago, we implemented ServiceNow. This offered us a formal ticketing solution aligned with what our HR and IT teams were already utilizing. Now, we’ve standardized support across business functions, creating a one-stop shop for customers with issues. So, if you are facing a similar frustration as your program has matured, I encourage you to look around at what your organization is already leveraging. Is there a service you can simply plug into to align with other functional areas? If not, consider a formal ticketing software to manage your automation support requests. At a certain maturity level, it’s crucial to stop trying to twist an informal solution to meet the level of sophistication you likely need to continue to scale successfully.
Don’t Neglect Enhancements
If your automations are running smoothly enough, getting tunnel vision with new projects in your pipeline is easy. New projects present the opportunity for significant ROI and savings, which are the metrics leadership wants to see. For this reason, it becomes easy to de-prioritize existing automations that need enhancements. An enhancement can take 2-3 weeks to complete but not result in significant savings. However, it does prevent bigger issues down the road. Therein lies the challenge of keeping enhancement efforts in the mix. It’s a delicate balancing act that, to be honest, we are still navigating at BSC. But my advice remains: be intentional and proactive with your priorities and, as tempting as it might be, do not neglect enhancements.
Support Yourself
We’re in the business of automation—making life easier for our customers day in and day out. Don’t forget to do that for yourself! Continue to evolve yourself and upskill your team. Challenge yourself to streamline your processes and tackle bottlenecks hindering your own work. Support yourself by making your own life easier because it will only make you a better automator for your organization.
Final Thoughts
Production support must be prioritized. Put intentional effort into supporting your automations effectively and efficiently, and your business will reap the benefits. Continually upskill your team and empower them to learn new technologies. Continually reevaluate bottlenecks and endeavor to improve your support processes. And finally, prioritize communication. Be responsive, provide proactive communication, and ensure interactions with your team are easy and positive. All these things will optimize performance, gain trust, and ensure continued investment in your team and program.