MAINTENANCE PLANNING

Projects are frequently commissioned with little consideration for the maintenance burden that will occur after the project has completed. Most of the project team will not be involved after the final delivery of the project and they are therefore not greatly interested in the maintenance aspects of the project. You must overcome this disinterest and make sure that maintenance is properly planned. You need to communicate to the project team that maintenance planning is an essential part of the project delivery. Team members should understand that the results of the project may be used for a substantial amount of time. It is essential they realize that, for the sponsoring organization, maintenance needs must be adequately planned.

In many organizations it is a requirement at the start of a project that a maintenance plan is produced. This condition is often driven by principles derived from the organization's quality system. As a result the maintenance plan becomes a prerequisite to passing early milestones. In smaller projects where the scope is well understood, this makes sense. It enables the organization to understand fully the burden that it is creating and to include that burden in any cost analysis. However, this is not always true for advanced projects. In advanced projects, you should treat requests for a maintenance plan at the start of your project with caution. Much of the initial work on an advanced project concerns prototyping and building new, advanced features. These features are not understood until the prototyping phase completes. Therefore it is difficult sensibly to predict the maintenance burden associated with them.

Despite these difficulties it is likely that you will be required to produce a maintenance plan. The sponsoring organization will want to have some indication of the likely maintenance costs. If this happens then you should try to help. However, you should make sure that any plan includes a section outlining any areas where the tasks are poorly understood. As the project progresses, the developed maintenance plan should be reviewed and updated on an ongoing basis.

Many companies have their own templates for maintenance plans. However, there are some common areas that need to be covered in all plans: upkeep and general defect fixing, skills retention and development, identified future work and contractual position.

Upkeep and general defect fixing

This is the area that is normally thought of when project managers are asked to produce a maintenance plan. It involves the work associated with the maintenance and upkeep of whatever is produced at the end of the project. This work ensures that there is a means of fixing minor faults or for making minor adjustments to the outcome of the project. This form of maintenance needs to be accounted for to ensure that the organization is able to keep the outcome of the project up to date. A simple example of this type of maintenance would be painting the exterior of a new building. This is a task that will need to be carried out on a periodic basis after the building project has been completed.

To develop this part of the maintenance plan you need to review the various project deliverables in order to determine whether maintenance post-delivery will be required. If maintenance is required then it will need to be included in the maintenance plan. The simplest method of establishing what maintenance is required is to discuss the deliverables with the team responsible for them. This can be easily achieved by talking to the work package manager of each team. You should ask the work package managers to consider each of their deliverables and to determine whether any post-delivery attention is likely. A simple form can help you gather this information in a consistent format (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1: Maintenance of deliverables

Once the information has been gathered you should hold a meeting with the work package manager to review the information provided. At the meeting you should expand on the information in the form. After meeting all of the work package managers you should be in a position to set out a plan for the maintenance and general defect fixing activities.

Skills retention and development

Unlike upkeep and general defect fixing, skills retention and subsequent development is an area that is often forgotten when writing a maintenance plan. There are three types of skill sets: those the organization already possesses, new skills needed only for the duration of the project and new skills the organization needs both for the project and beyond. When planning maintenance the last skill set is the one that requires the most attention. The first skill set, existing skills, should be dealt with by existing processes within the organization. The second skill set, project-specific skills, will only be needed for the duration of the project and therefore it does not need to be maintained. However, the last skill set, new ongoing skills, is not covered by existing processes and does need to be maintained .

The form shown in Figure 7.1 includes a section asking the work package manager to state what skills are required to support a particular delivery. It is a simple task for you to take this list and transform it into a list like the one shown in Table 7.1.

Table 7.1: Skills review table

Deliverable	Resource System architect	Junior developer	Software developer	Senior developer	Tester	Integration engineer
UI	1
Core engine		2	3	1	1
Server engine				1	1	1
Network router	1		1		1	1
Number of people per month	2	2	4	2	3	2

The number of resources and the different resource types have been identified along the top of the table. These resource types are cross-referenced to the deliverables, which are shown on the left-hand side of the table. This presents , in an easy-to-read format, the required number of resources of a given type. Once the table has been completed you should include the profile within the maintenance plan. If the organization does not have a training or staff development group , you will need to add more detail. This means building training and recruitment plans for the different skills required.

Identified future work

It is extremely difficult for you to complete all of the work that your customer would like you to undertake. Instead you will have to make compromises in order to ensure that the majority of the work is achieved in a reasonable timescale . You will get the customer to agree to these compromises by using the change request process to remove activities that cannot be completed in time. Despite getting this agreement the tasks removed by the compromise process will usually still be required by the sponsoring organization. Effectively their completion is transferred out of the project and returned to the organization's line sections.

Project managers often deliberately ignore the tasks that have been deferred until after the project has completed. They feel that since the tasks are not part of the project they are sensible in ignoring them. They do not want to spend energy tackling tasks that ultimately will not be their responsibility. This is a poor way to proceed. Project customers will be anxious that they have identified tasks that may never get completed. If their concerns are not dealt with effectively then customers will continually seek to get the tasks reintroduced to the project. They will also become reluctant to allow tasks to be removed from the project through change control. It is much better for you to recognize the tasks and take the lead in planning for their completion. This keeps the customer happy and makes managing the relationship with the customer much simpler. An effective way of planning the tasks is to develop a road map that explains the activities that are required during the first year after the project has closed (see Table 7.2).

Table 7.2: Simple road map

	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Software released to market	Start advertising campaign	Flood channels with software ready for sales	Release upgrade version of software	Fill channels for Christmas sales push
	Group ZEE produce plans		Prepare for Christmas sales push
	All work outsourced	Train factory staff Set up call centre	Fix defects reported by customers

This simple chart allows customers a reference point to enable them to see what life will be like post-project completion. Its visual impact will enable customers to form a picture in their mind showing what will happen without the project team in place. It shows the work that needs to be completed and indicates an approximate time for its completion. You should develop this chart in conjunction with the customer. This activity should be tackled in a similar manner to the initial work undertaken on macro planning. This means that you will need to develop a work package (see Figure 2.11) for each of the activities. This work package should be signed off and agreed with the customer.

Contractual position

Contracts whose work is undertaken post-project closure are often set up and agreed by you on behalf of the sponsoring organization. These contracts can cover many aspects of the project but most of them are for maintenance activities such as regular building repairs . To help the organization ensure a smooth transition of contracts from project to line unit you should prepare a list of the contracts and their status (see Table 7.3). This will help to ensure that customers feel that they have this aspect of the project under control.

Table 7.3: Contract status

Contract	Reference	Brief work description	Cost

The left-hand side of the form lists all of the contracts that are required and a reference to allow the customer to find greater detail regarding the contract. The right-hand side lists the work content of the contract and the ongoing cost of the contract. The cost would normally be shown as a complete contract cost but the form can be easily adjusted to account for individual contracts' vagaries.

Not all contracts will be with a group outside of the sponsoring organization. Often contracts are set up between divisions within the same organization. These contracts can be quite legalistic in nature and they are often set up as a service level agreement.

There is no standard format for a service level agreement. They vary in content depending on the company or organization using them. However, service level agreements are all aiming to achieve the same objective. This objective is to state what services one part of the organization is going to provide another part of the organization.

A service level agreement, sometimes known as an SLA, should cover all of the fundamentals of a project. However, unlike in a project, the fundamentals need to be covered from an ongoing perspective. The fundamentals are: resource, which includes the staff costs and any ongoing consumables ; scope costs, which contain the minor upgrades that will be required as part of the ongoing costs; quality costs, which relate to the fixing of defects; and finally timescale costs, which are the outcome of how often each of the costs occurs. Often organizations involve the contract departments in the setting up of service level agreements. This can result in the text becoming long and unnecessarily legalistic. There is no real necessity for this. It is normally much better for a few pages to be drawn up that explain what is required and how often it will be delivered.