Customer Support Projects - the right way to do it

[Stefan Pascal]

Hello.

We have a lot of customer support projects in our company, with a lot of
people involved in such activities. Unfortunately we don't have special
allocated persons for the support projects. This is how we are dealing
with this process right now:
1. The project team is built up from available resources and/or project
requirements.
2. The project team develops the application and delivers the solution
to the customer.
3. One or two developers (consultants) from the project team becomes the
support person(s) for that project.

Now, these resources will be allocated to our next projects, but we
still want to keep track of support effort to the finished project. So,
right now we create a fixed duration project (a couple of fixed duration
tasks - on-site support, online support, etc.) that finishes at the end
of the current year and allocate all support members with 1%.

There are two reasons for this:
1. We need (want) that the support tasks appear on every timesheet the
support team member creates.
2. We want the support team member to be able to report actual work
hours whenever they require.

The final (actual) question would be: does anyone have such a scheme in
their company? How do you deal with it? Is there another way of creating
support projects that will give the resource the possibility to report
on these support tasks (without the need of creating a self-assigned task)?

Thank you.

Stefan Pascal
Team Leader, Automation

 

[Marc Soester [MVP]]

Hi Stefan,

I think that the approach your are taking is certainly one that works. There
are other ways to deal with it, but it all comes down to the same outcome

1. the abillity to enter time against a support task
2. the ability to view the support time entered against a resource.

It doesnt really matter if you add a support task to a completed project or
if you create a "Support Project". What you need to consider is reporting. If
you wish to report the total time spend on a project ( including support ) it
may makes sense to add a task to the project.
If you want to report against total time spend on support you may want to
create a support projects.
If the process you have introduced in your organisations works, great.
Hope this helps