The company is a software house who develop a software product. It has many customers so it receives many support call most of them are escalated to the developers. This is unpredicted. The management insist to use the same developers in the new project which is a nightmare, if you need to develop a plan because the resources are not secured for the project(you never know if they will get a support and this happens a lot).
I know that the best way to do this is to establish a new support team. But this is the longtime plan. What else can be done as a short time plan. Saving Changes...
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Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
I''m not sure what else you can do. For us, it''s more important to keep the business running than launch new functionalilty. After all, if a support query is going to bring a client complaint or stop a department working, then you''ve got to fix it. Could you at least have one ring-fenced developer while you look to build a new support team? Any extra hands you can get will have to be good. Or set up a rota scheme? I can''t imagine that every support call needs every developer, so if they are multi-skilled you might be able to stop them from all being pulled into fix one error. Saving Changes...
Some time all the developers are supporting customers. And as I said it is not predictable. Saving Changes...
Howard LaiPMP, CEng, CPEng, NER, IntPE(Aust), RPEQ, MIET, CSSBB, CISA, ISO9001 LA| QHBrisbane, Queensland, Australia
Would you consider Agile methodology? It is more flexible if the resource are not certain. Saving Changes...
Stéphane ParentSelf Employed / Semi-retired| Leader MakerPrince Edward Island, Canada
Our company also has software products which forces the developers to split their time between support and new development.
It requires setting percentages of developer''s time for each project and account. The majority of my team members are only part-time on my projects.
It means our company has to put a lot of emphasis on enterprise resources management. It also means I have to constantly negotiate with management and colleagues for the needed resources Saving Changes...
Dominic LawProduct Manager| PCCW GlobalHappy Valley, Hong Kong
Although the supporting tasks are unpredictable, I suppose you can still have a forecast of how many hours per month. I also suppose your development project is less time critical, that means no need to respond to request immediately. You can still make a project time plan with these constraints in mind. However, you should still monitor the critical path, in case the supporting workload has increased. Your risk management should take care of that. If the amount of resources is not enough to complete your project, then you should highlight that risk and escalate in the Project Planning stage. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
I fully agree with @Stephane. I thing we have two problems to solve here. The first one is regarding the support calls. What type of calls are these? You need to understand if the calls are because product malfunction, because the customers do not know the function they claim is actually implemented, because.... What I mean, to create a separate support team could not solve the problem. The fact that the call is escalated to developers is the worst case you can have inside this type of environments. The second one is resources. As @Stephane mentioned the organization has to think about enterprise resource management which is the basement where resources are limited mainly. Saving Changes...
