Maintenance Plans Road Map (baselining)

When the decision is made to introduce a new service or to make changes to an existing service, there is usually an immediate business reason to do so. If there is new service or product being installed, then someone has developed the business case to justify the purchase of that new service. This justification should have also included the life cycle costs as part of the business continuity model, which should include the cost of performing the preventive maintenance throughout the life of that service and product.

Having a roadmap to preventive maintenance allows us to manage the lifecycle of a service or system to ensure it is available to our customers with minimal disruption with managed risks. This approach also allows us to move away from a reactive to a proactive approach and enable us onto a planned phase of all our services, be it be in the form of a contract renewal, server hardware upgrade, software upgrade, resource allocation etc.

The initial costs of setting up a preventative maintenance plan for some services (systems) could be seen as high but the Rate of Investment (ROI) can actually bring higher benefits. The model below is an illustration of a maintenance plan that can be used as a reference when the business case or Business Opportunity Document (BOD) is introduced and referenced within the project planning phase as well a post go-live to ensure services are kept proactively maintained. 

There is no definitive definition of the following categories but is presented here for information and as a guide for the maintenance plan so that it can be adopted in some form into ones project plan and continuous support of the service it is meant to deliver. Whilst this is a generic model, it can be adapted for cloud based solutions which may require a slightly different approach in managing a service such that instead of a hardware refresh, a cloud solution/contract review will be required. In terms of testing system failovers we would expect the cloud based solution provider to validate system integrity.

Business Plans / Vision

A business plan is a written document that describes and outlines not only what the business is all about but also how a business is going to meet its business objectives. In this example to deliver a service or a product.

Strategic Plans

The strategic plan is a document that outlines a business’s vision, mission statement, goals and objectives over a specified time frame. Consider the strategic plan as a road map for insiders to be used a guide to achieve success. Eg: the goals and objective set by the business plan.

Tactical plans

Whilst the strategic plan provides the general idea of how to reach a goal(s), the tactical plan is where one lays out the steps and the actions that must be taken to achieve that goal(s). Tactical planning is a short range planning proposal to ensure successful outcomes from operational risks.

Maturity: for proactive maintenance

The Maintenance Maturity Model in this illustration includes four levels of maintenance maturity:

• Reactive - This means run to failure or repairing the asset after it malfunctions. We should strive to move away from this position.
• Preventative - This stage attempts to prevent failure by maintaining our assets (hardware & software infrastructure) at pre-scheduled time intervals and is the next step in maintenance maturity.
• Predictive - This stage provides alerts around a single point of failure, but does not reflect the health of assets as a whole. Predicting failure has become easier with the advent of software learning tools.
• Proactive - This level not only identifies issues before they happen, but lays out the processes and people necessary to avoid asset malfunction.

The aim is to strive towards the proactive model.

Provisioning

This is about aligning ones resources to ensure delivery of the project is successful. Ongoing maintenance and support has not been forgotten but is being proactively planned and managed.

• Product: Refers to a system, software product or a service
• Hardware: Hardware infrastructure the product is hosted upon, including networking etc. This could be on-prem or a cloud based solution.
• Resource: People and funds (Capital Expenditure(CapEx) v Operational Expenditure(OpEx)) allocation against a suitable timeframe
• Business: Working in partnership with the business stakeholders who needs to review their business and strategic plans to keep on track.
• Supplier: Suppliers are not just vendors but also partners in the product lifecycle. Managing suppliers is not easy but we need to ensure they are part of this journey, reviewing contracts, SLAs and as well as ensuring the infrastructure is tested regularly for resilience and system failures and disaster recovery scenarios. 

Business Continuity

Business continuity is the capability of your enterprise to stay online and deliver products and services during disruptive events, such as system failures, communication failures, and cyberattacks. It can also include systems inability to failover safely to secondary backup systems. This should be captured in the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and ultimately as part of a Disaster Recovery(DR) strategy document.

Failover is a backup operational mode that automatically switches to a standby secondary system, a database, a server or network if the primary system fails, or is shut down for servicing. Failover is an extremely important function for critical systems that require always-on accessibility.

Since IT systems and technologies are constantly changing, we need to:

• Test our systems regularly which helps to ensure the Business Continuity Plans (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) plans is up to date.
• Ensure regular failover tests to backup systems are carried out by suppliers hosting the service, to ensure resilience and service operability in the likelihood of the primary system failing. This should be part of the maintenance plans.
• Projects Manager managing projects to deliver new or updated services ensure these are considered in their planning from their suppliers.