Support

Redgum’s focus is on providing the best long term return on your solution investment.

To achieve this, Redgum tailor an adjustable support package to suit your solution, goals and budget.

The components that we offer include:

  • Continuous Improvement. A “not to be exceeded” monthly budget for refinement and improvement of the system.

  • Maintenance. Monitoring, reporting and upkeep of the environments and technologies surrounding your investment.

  • Service Level Agreement. Rapid response plan for dealing with critical issues in the live system.

Continuous Improvement

A “not to be exceeded” monthly budget for refinement and improvement of the system. This is an allowance for small changes, tweaks and refinements that you and early adopters will ask for outside of the planned stage designs. Each item may be 2 hours to 2 days work and would be batched with a set of changes made per fortnight or month. NOTE: any larger items would typically be put into a fixed price stage budget, not into this budget.

Redgum continually gather feedback from a range of sources including user issues, usage metrics, items raised from maintenance, new requests for capability from users and the business. They also come in from ideas and external sources like customer or supplier requests.

Through regular sprint meetings these items are prioritized, planned and executed on. The business has the flexibility to set and adjust a monthly budget to balance forward progress against.

This process keeps your business gaining the best return from the solution.

Benefits

Redgum’s continuous improvement support package is aimed at:

  1. Extending the lifespan of your investment. The longer you can continue to return value from the solution, the greater payoff you will get.

  2. Expanding the capability of your investment. Providing more relevant functionality to your users extends your capability to address your customer base.

  3. Keeping your users and customers engaged with your investment. The more users are engaged the greater your return. The longer each customer stays with your solution, the longer your return cycle becomes.

  4. Large stage development provides primary capability. Tuning this capability to best optimize this capability to the needs of the users dramatically increases the returns on the initial investment.

  5. More engaged users. Being able to request and have their working lives improved provides a huge benefit to an organization.

  6. Incrementally adjusting. Making many small adjustments is the most cost effective way of keeping a system current and improving.

  7. Short investments, ongoing returns. Each 2-week cycle provides a small investment, this investment starts paying off directly. The benefits are seen quickly and the return is captured within months.

Maintenance

The technology landscape changes rapidly, maintenance ensures the investment you have made stays current.

Maintenance provides monitoring, reporting and upkeep of the environments and technologies surrounding your investment. This dramatically extends the lifespan of your solution, keeping it current with patches, security updates and new versions of underlying technology.

This maintenance includes ongoing support for Development, UAT and Production environments. Testing, deployment and supporting technologies. Critical failure point monitoring. Database validation and performance monitoring. Optionally it includes database “hot restore” service.

Redgum execute a series of maintenance tasks and provides a regular fortnightly or monthly report into failures observed and fixed, database issues, performance metrics feedback, third party technology stack changes, security or other environmental changes, changes to build and deployment environments.

This report provides action items for yourself or for Redgum to execute. It optionally includes an allocation for fixing priority items as they are identified.

Risk Mitigation

Maintenance provides consistency.

Without maintenance every issue, every release, would be starting from scratch and treated as a new project, with associated costs.

Degrading of Systems over time

Each release of a software system is essentially a snapshot of the technology and surrounding systems at the time of its creation. Unfortunately, information technologies have a habit of becoming obsolete quite quickly.

For example, technologies go end-of-life or are no longer supported, or third party web services change or disappear. Any system ages in much the same way as, say, a new car, but often at a much higher rate than a vehicle.

Over some typical timespans:

  • 3 months – Everything is usually OK. A few minor things change, updates but go largely unnoticed.

  • 6-12 months – There are security patches, hotfixes, updates and service packs that shift the underlying

Windows environment.

  • • 1-2 years – The underlying .Net technology stack, for example, will have incrementally changed so far

    that new changes can’t be made to old platforms.

  • • 5 years – The technology stack today will be nearing end of life and most developers and official vendor

    support will have moved on. The software may effectively have to be complete replaced at this point

Un-maintainability

As software ages, it becomes harder and harder to maintain. Skills are lost, technology is no longer supported or simply disappears, and the code in a sense becomes brittle. A well-maintained system avoids this by being kept up to date. Because it is constantly maintained, the understanding of how it fits together is not lost. And the technology is it built on is kept up to date.

Technical Obsolescence

Unfortunately, platforms and support systems are a moving target. In the IT world, the lifetime for a given technology can be as little as eighteen months. If a piece of software is not constantly maintained, and incrementally improved as technology advances, it will be obsolete even before it has paid for itself.

Orphaned Software

Software that has been unmaintained for any length of time is effectively orphaned. To upgrade it is a huge process, and often the entire system has the characteristics of a black box which must be teased open with huge effort. Frequently systems like this are also completely undocumented and close to un-maintainable as a result. Often the only solution is to start again from scratch.

Disruption due to Major Changes in Software Environments

New versions of Windows are always coming through. The rules and security requirements for writing Windows applications are changing faster. Having a stagnating technology means your ability to keep your office current with new versions of windows will become an issue. As an example, think of the relatively recently orphaning of Windows XP, or the introduction of Windows 10, which approaches interfaces quite differently and no longer supports some older Windows technologies.

Benefits

The key benefit is your investment is able to return its value for longer. Typically, an unmaintained system can fail within 2-5 years depending on the underlying technologies. A maintained system can extend this lifespan to 10 years or more. With continuous improvement the original investment may stay current longer.

Future Proofing

Ongoing maintenance ensures that a software system will always be up-to-date, and will never be left behind by changes in its software environment.

Familiarity

Because the system will frequently be given attention, the Redgum team will always be familiar with it. Without this familiarity, there can be an enormous ramp-up time to reach an understanding of how the system actually works. This lack of familiarity is often a factor in projects taking a long time to fix or failing altogether.

Reduced Downtime

The responsiveness of the maintenance system at Redgum means there is a minimum of downtime with any system. This is aided by the error management system, easy access to build and test environments, and familiarity with the maintained system.

Documentation

Redgum’s Redprint system is constantly updated with relevant information about all projects. This is the central repository for all pertinent information, which is always available. This documentation includes software designs, data designs, supporting documentation, information about relevant servers, services or hosting etc. This documentation is maintained as part of the regular maintenance.

Traceability through History

All tasks and issues are recorded in the issue tracking system. Every issue ever created is in there, back to the very start of the project. This allows tracing of any previous issues which resemble current issues, and gives a long history of the work down on the project. This linked to documentation on stages and phases of each project, so the large blocks of work performed can be traced. This provides both high level and incremental traceability, capturing the knowledge around your IP and how it was formed.

Service Level Agreement

For some solutions there is a need for a rapid response on critical issues. In these situations, Redgum provide an agreed set of response parameters which enable to you ensure continuity of your operation.

Redgum charge a base fee in order to keep the appropriate systems and staff available.

Based on the priority and response requirements we agree on an hourly rate trigged only when the situation demands it.

What is the cost of a long running issue to you?

  • Will your business stop earning?

  • Will your customers lose faith?

  • Will your suppliers tighten the screws?

  • Will your staff lose their drive?

  • Will your project lose focus?

A service level agreement will ensure that Redgum has skilled staff ready with the systems and processes required need to respond rapidly to any technical or other incidents, and enables them to diagnose and fix issues while keeping you informed is a critical component to many operations.

SOME PRACTICAL EXAMPLES

Critical 24/7 support

One client provides software to manage bulk carrier port infrastructure. If there is a breakdown the company loses $1000 per minute. There are around 500 potential points of failure. This is critical, the faster a solution, the better.

Another client has an online business, tracking over 2000 orders per day, with each order worth an average of $100. An outage of 3 hours will have direct costs of $2500.

Critical business hours support

An internal application manages operations for several departments. The cost of staff wages and on-costs, coupled with associated opportunity costs adds up to around $100 per person per hour. An outage of 3 hours affecting 10 staff members can cost $3000.

Moderate business hours support

An application is used to manage key aspects of a team’s operation. If a failure occurs, they can still operate manually and via the phone. There is a single department driving the operation and it’s their internal reputation that is on the line. In this example, it is not business critical, but there does need to be a response within the same business day and progress made.

Benefits

  • Peace of mind and business continuity - knowing you can support your staff and customers is critical to business decisions and agreement making.

  • Reduced down time – the directly incurred costs of downtime can be reduced as much as possible, as well the providing a reduction in the indirect cost of downtime (reputation/trust issues, backlog problems etc.)

  • Business communication - feedback from a short term workaround implementation, through to full problem resolution means you can keep staff, customers and suppliers informed and able to plan accordingly.

Packages

Redgum will work with you to define the level of service appropriate to your situation.

Options include:

  • High availability 24 hours.

  • High availability work hours and cusp (3 hours either side of business hours).

  • High availability during business hours.

  • Measured response during business hours.