Determine a process and teams responsible for support from initial triage to proper escalation management to different teams and vendors.

Overview

Organizations use Low Code/No Code platforms and emerging delivery models to build automations and integrations quickly. Further, applying the Project Execution lever of the GEARS framework helps teams deliver projects with reduced cycle times and lower implementation costs. However, support and maintenance make up a significant portion of automation's lifecycle. This is because integrated business processes and applications continue to change and evolve, necessitating changes or even breaking existing automations. Some automations could be critical to business where any service disruption or downtime could be unacceptable.

The Support Model lever helps automation practice streamline the approach for responding to changes and resolving issues to support the business.

The approach to the Support Model for your automation practice should address the following:

• Determining the teams responsible for supporting changes and incidents.
• Defining support workflows, including the appropriate tooling for requesting and managing support requests.
• Establishing performance and service level agreements for consistent understanding across teams.
• Documenting processes and knowledge of operating live automations.

Service Level Agreements

Establishing Service Level Agreements creates a shared understanding between the automation users and the provider, defining the quality of service metrics by which automation performance is measured. Having well-defined SLAs help set the right expectations and accountability between teams.

Traditionally, organizations adopt a tiered approach to support automation projects. 

• [Level 0] Self-support: Enabled through self-serve support based on available knowledge assets such as documentation, community discussions, Enterprise Resource Center, Workato Chat support, etc. 
• [Level 1] Ops/Support desk team: Typically, the existing centralized operations team takes additional responsibility to support the automation projects at this level. This team can help troubleshoot fundamental issues and provides an escalation path to connect end-users with automation specialists for more complex issues.
• [Level 2] Automation Experts: Designated automation experts in each team to provide in-depth troubleshooting support for resolving the issue. For example, the application admins are good candidates for Level 2 support since they can access the automation platform and business systems to identify and fix the issues.
• [Level 3] Automation HQ team: Automation platform experts to provide Subject Matter Expertise (SME) support to help resolve complex technical issues.
• [Level 4] Vendor support: Automation platform vendor or external support requests for issues that cannot be supported internally. Usually, the Automation HQ team logs a vendor support ticket for assistance with specific topics.

Most organizations may require only 2-3 levels of support, and not all of them. The design of an automation practice will significantly influence the suitable support model for the organization. 

For example, organizations moving to distributed execution could require only two levels of support since the end users and automation builders may belong to the same team. Such organizations design a more collaborative approach with proper delineation around who resolves the problems and how to seek expert assistance when needed.

Some of the most common benefits of good support models include:

• Allows for quick incident response time, ensuring the right people are assigned for the issue resolution.
• Improves knowledge sharing between teams for continuous improvement to avoid similar problems in the future.
• Promotes cross-team collaboration for driving service delivery efficiency.