In most big organization,resources are often categorized as 'Value Add' and 'Commodities'. 'Commodities' groups are often outsourced and this include developers and supports. 'Value Add' groups are BAU organization and often comprises of management and gatekeeper who contribute to impact analysis and decision making on certain action or escalation point when issue or change arise. They tend to form a lean organization structure who participate in advisory,coordination and management workforce. In order to have a standard agreeable escalation point either to project as enhancement or support as bug/break fixes, the Value Add group's decisions need to be governed by a set of rules call 'CAB exemption list'.
As the structure and solutions in an organization are different, the way this exemption list evolves is different. But the baseline of arriving at a standard agreeable ownership of issues and clear defined process has to be based on the content of the list. This list is an ongoing efforts to put down the ownership of issues based on the objects together with different type of scenarios that could possibly trigger the change of the object. Eg. In cases like a DTP,missing DTP is categorize as CAB1 as this impact the daily process chain while new DTP filtering rule are CAB2 as it may be an enhancement to cater for any new business rules. Any new scenarios need to be discussed in the CAB meeting to agree on which category it falls into, either CAB1 or CAB2. In a nutshell, CAB1 is a list of responsibilities held for bug and break fixes. CAB2 is a list of objects that involves enhancement to existing design. Small/easy enhancements such as adding values to the condition of filtering can be addressed by Support team wherelse multiple enhancements or big enhancement can be grouped into a mini project that falls into project.
It is still a debatable subject on whether SME falls under 'Commodities' or 'Value Add' group. This question back on the reliability to outsource entire development work to vendors with only indirect participation of BAU during build review session. SME of BI solutions requires a thorough understanding of technical and functional requirement for a particular solution and they are the best people to perform any impact analysis to the proposed solution. Most of the BI impact assessment are technical as they are the receiver system of the business change in the feed system of R/3,external system or APO.As such it is possible that the technical impact assessment can be done via the help of BI meta-repository and a where-used lookup. There are other exceptional cases in which changes in R/3 or feed system has to be impact analyze at BI level due to the nature of datasource or content being 'modified' at source system level (Please refer to my other post on this). This is because the projects are often the expert of the solutions because they design the solution and the gatekeeper will not have the necessary detailed insight of the design and build unless it's from blueprint and walk through sessions. The gatekeeper may not be involved in Support issues as well unless the support team is not performing according to their job scope.Support on the other hand is the group who understand the in and out of the flaws of the design as they are the front liner for any issues logged by business users.
It is also a common overlook of role feasibility when a BAU organization which aims to be a lean organization in IT services starts to streamline all 'subjects' (especially in BI where it consist of a range of different solutions for different reporting purposes) into one single SME role and further extend the role to a 'Value Add' gatekeeper role who held responsible for any changes that land into the system.
On top of all that, the next successful outsource strategy will evolve around the concept of 'long term partnership' and not base on mere vendor-client relationship as it takes a close knitted working relationship to form a successful IT organization in a corporate company.
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