Production Support: The production support is for commonly occurring and mundane problems, which needs immediate attention. The idea behind providing offshore support is to facilitate onsite concentrate more on exigencies and critical problems first, since they are business critical operations of the client directly.

The services can be provided: 24X7; 24X5; 16X7; 16X5; 8X5

Classification of Tickets - SLAs

The criticality of the tickets is based on the priorities of the tickets and are categorized as given below:

Priority 1 tickets:
System function is not available that effects the workflow of a mission critical system, or where work stoppage is evident for multiple users. Requires immediate attention. Normally SLA for priority 1 tickets is between 1 to 2 hours.

Priority 2 tickets:
System function is not available that effects the workflow of a single user of a Non-mission critical system where no work around is available. Typically SLA for priority 2 tickets is between 24 to 48 hours.

Priority 3 tickets:
System problems that have adequate manual work around procedures in place, or non-critical nuisance type problems. SLA for priority 3 tickets is around 48 hours.

Bug-Fixes/Root Cause Fixes: The system problems that require adequate research to be made that may be followed by permanent fixes to resolve the problem are termed as ‘Bug fixes’. Typically the SLA for this type of problems will be around one calendar month.

Enhancements: Major changes to the functionality of various applications that involve Design, Development and Implementation phases are categorized as Enhancements. Usually these enhancements are billed on T & M basis.

Support Tasks are scheduled tasks to be done in support of Business process changes or routine processing to support regular business processes and developing work around for more persistent problems.
Appendix:

Managerial Goals
1.       Lower maintenance cost and/or cycle time
2.       Reduce maintenance backlog
3.       Improve the quality of maintenance fixes
4.       Achieve greater reliability
5.       Compensate for loss of staff and/or skill loss
6.       Increase raw product performance
7.       Increase capacity to accommodate more processing demand
8.       Remove obsolete functions
9.       Replace custom software components with more standard parts, e.g. Graphical User Inter-faces, data base management systems, transaction processing monitors
10.   Replace obsolete and/or custom user terminal equipment
11.   Add new functionality
12.   Integrate disconnected, but functionally related, applications into a suite with a more consistent user interface, shared data bases, etc.
13.   Comply with directives to convert source code programming language(s)
14.   Reuse Legacy / Mainframe components on another specific project
15.   Populate a generic reuse library with Legacy / Mainframe components
16.   Restructuring and rationalizing data files