Production
Support
Services
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Nearshore Methodologies
Having attended corporate clients, e-Core has acquired expertise in nearshore outsourcing, a variation of the offshore model in which IT services are carried out in a country which is geographically close to the contracting company’s headquarters. E-Core offers its clients a highly flexible and optimized nearshore methodology that guarantees complete collaboration between onsite and offsite teams. Without forsaking quality and productivity, e-Core’s nearshore model blends convenience and efficiency with competitive prices, taking into account that the projects’ resources can be rationalized and adapted to the clients’ needs.
e-Core’s model has been designed to meet the highest quality standards in offsite IT consultancy and development services. It is based on industry standards of IT services management. This document describes the organizational structure, the development process and the communication plan aimed to support the services operation.
e-Core (http://www.ecoreusa.com) is a Brazilian nearshore application outsourcing company specialized in helping small and medium sized Independent Software Vendors and Software Enabled Companies to increase their productivity and quality by providing IT solutions using an optimum onshore/nearshore engagement model.
With wide experience building high performance teams by allocating dedicated teams in our development center in Brazil and exchanging knowledge with customers about methodologies, tools and best-of-breed practices in software development, e-Core creates innovative IT
e-Core: Offsite IT Service Delivery Model
solutions that generates great value to our customers.
Since 2008 selected as one of the best places to work in Brazil (IT & Telecom) according to Computerworld’s annual report, e-Core has a strong global team composed of smart and talented individuals committed to delivering high quality work. Alignment with core values is a pillar for e-Core’s customer-focused culture. Working at e-Core means living these values and being responsible for the success of every client in every interaction and project.
3 A customer making use of e-Core’s services can benefit from the already existing Onshore (U.S.A.) and Nearshore (Brazil) structures currently operated by e-Core. Brazil offers a series of advantages, such as:
• Very competitive prices
• Convenient time-zone (GMT-3: only 2 hours ahead of EST)
• Cultural similarities
• Highly qualified labor force
• Low-risk geopolitical and economic environment
• Well established and secure infrastructure
As a result, each project can be dealt with according to its particular needs, and the presence of professionals at the customer’s site can be easily arranged, either for a whole project or for specific activities, like requirements gathering and production deployment. At the same time, the offsite structure can provide high quality services at lower costs, while benefiting from the close relationship with the onsite team.
Brazil
Talented resources Timezone proximity Cost efficiency Cultural compatibility Favorable economic environment4
PRODUCTION SUPPORT
Often overlooked, production support is much more than a phone number for end-users to call. A diversified team is needed, with excellent communication skills, business and technical knowledge. Production Support is commonly seen as a bug-fixing activity, but at e-Core we go further: we listen to end-users, understand their needs and transform their requirements into possible enhancements to be analyzed and implemented. We will tailor-make a production support solution that suits your needs in terms of team size, responsibilities, SLAs and deliverables.
We split Production Support activities in three different levels: Initial user support, solution without development, solution involving a development team.
L1 - Initial user support
L2 - Solution without development
L3 - Solution involving a development team
Level 1
Initial user support
This is where support team receives a request from end-users, usually through e-mail, telephone or a web-based tool. The first step is to understand the user’s needs.
Afterwards, the support team works to solve the problem that has been brought up. The user request can be closed at this stage when it is a system usage problem or when the user has questions about the business process and support experts are able to solve the issue right away. Other possible resolution from this point is when the issue raised needs additional work, consequently it will go from this level to one of the other levels.
"Developing an event-driven social media network has many moving pieces. However, e-Core stepped in to an extremely complicated situation and managed to make sense of it all. We trust e-Core to get the job done on time and exceed our expectations.”
George Beardsley, Chief Strategy Officer Co-Founder UNATION
Level 2
Solution without development
In this case, after receiving a request from an end-user, the support experts need to take some additional action, other than basic user guidance.
Some examples could be accessing the system with “Support Role” to perform some action allowed only to the support team, executing DB scripts to create a new entity in the system, creating a custom SQL report to suit user-specific needs or even correcting some small issues through DB scripts.
At this level, we will be able to solve user request without involving the development team and without having to deploy a new version of the application.
Level 3
Solution involving a development
team
We will get to this level after a request has been analyzed and our support team verifies that development efforts will be needed, and a new version of the system will have to be deployed. At this level we will prioritize the issues with our client and work on these items according to client needs.
Once released in Production, users will be notified that the requested changes have been released.
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SUPPORT PROCESS
6 During all these phases our team will follow a predefined process in order to log all activities into an issue tracking tool, so that not only our team can have a clear view of what the ongoing activities are at any given moment, but also our client can have access to all the activities being carried out by the support team. Alternatively, e-Core can use the customer’s own internal tools to carry on these activities. An additional benefit is the building of a knowledge repository that allows similar issues to be solved faster by leveraging findings from previous resolutions.
To define all these processes and also team size and structure, we will follow the steps and phases before starting the actual Production Support for your application. You can see the phases below:
Discovery phase
During this phase we will gather information about your company’s business, systems, IT structure and knowledge about the application to be supported. At the end of this phase we will have a good understanding of your business processes, technical issues, infrastructure and application to be supported. With this data we also will have an idea of team size needed to support your application.
Inception phase
During this phase we will start building our team. Our goal is to have our team ready, gather business requirements, lead knowledge transfer sessions and elaborate a transition plan. This plan will contain:
• Timeline with all scheduled activities • Communication plan • Responsibility matrix • SLAs
Transition phase
During this phase we will start with transition activities. We will share with our team the transition plan so they will all be aware of how support activities will be lead. If necessary we will keep updating the team involved on business and technical issues
Steady state phase
At this point we will have our team and infrastructure ready to support your application and assist your end users with application and business support. Team will be now fully involved with support activities as well as prioritizing bugs and enhancements.
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e-Core’s Infrastructure Availability
Internet Availability: 99.8% Telephone Availability: 99.7% Mean Time to Repair (MTTR):
Connection Type Solution
Severity 1 – Service entirely unavailable 04 hours
Severity 2 – Service partially available 12 hours
Severity 3 – Service with quality degradation 24 hours
Severity 4 – Other problems that do not affect the quality of the services 96 hours
Afterword
E-Core is ready to offer the highest quality standards in Offsite Software Consultancy Development Services, Quality Assurance and Production Support backed up by its Onshore (U.S.A) and Nearshore (Brazil) sites. Its customer centric approach allows it to tailor its services to each customer’s individual needs, including its personnel report structure and its Development Processes. Moreover, e-Core has many years of experience with corporate projects for large sized companies, and understands the challenges involved with such environments. All aspects involved with the Offsite Services Delivery, such as communication, technical infrastructure, business understanding and customer relationship have evolved through previous experiences and the expertise developed by e-Core can offer a stable and safe choice for your IT requirements.
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