Why do you need brakes on a car? And what does this have to do with Managing Application Maintenance? Jim Cisneros, Senior Vice President, ITresources, got everyone’s attention with this introduction to the topic of Managed Maintenance at the July meeting of the Project Management Institute (PMI), Orange County Chapter, held in Costa Mesa, CA.

This was the second time that Jim has been invited to speak at the monthly PMI Meeting. His first presentation was on the topic of “Our Journey to CMM Level 5,” an overview of ITresources moving from a CMM Level 1 to Level 5 in under 4 years. This follow-on presentation looked at using the same strong processes that your company uses for projects but for application maintenance. Speaking before a group of more than 100 project management professionals, the importance of Managed Maintenance became apparent as Jim talked about the associated budgets, client priorities and the ease of implementing controls similar to those used for development projects. Jim opened his remarks with the statistic that a ‘maintenance’ budget is traditionally 70-80% of an Information Technology (IT) budget and therefore, it represents a financially and functionally important segment of work to the IT department and its clients.

Control over application maintenance can be achieved by IT organizations at any level of maturity because the tools are similar to those used for development projects. The tools are just tailored to the maintenance scope and process, meaning less administration, a smaller team and fewer meetings. You still need to: track the request, define and estimate the work, measure the delivered budget and schedule and track any defects. The tools you select must be used consistently and rigorously to ensure quality and cost effectiveness.

Jim credits ITresources’ success in the area of managed maintenance with the tools that have been developed for this purpose. They include:

	Using a mini-spec format (scope, requirements, estimated hours, schedule, technical specs and unit test cases).
	Conducting a peer review of the mini-spec to take advantage of team expertise.
	Requiring client approval of the mini-spec before the work begins.
	Regularly assessing the backlog of requests, the average turnaround, resource planning and client priorities.

The benefits of these maintenance tools and controls are visible to ITresources’ clients by way of a decrease in maintenance costs of up to 15% annually. Clients then have the choice of enjoying their savings or using the funds for new development projects or infrastructure improvements. The benefits also extend to a major reduction in defects and far fewer on-call problems. Public companies can also profit from implementing consistent maintenance tools and controls in order to meet their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements.

As Jim summarized the importance of managed maintenance to every IT organization, he answered those haunting questions - why do you need brakes on a car? And what does this have to do with Managing Application Maintenance? You need brakes so you can drive really FAST - and know that when you need to stop, you’ll be able to. You need strong maintenance processes and tools so you can perform software changes and enhancements really FAST - and know you’ll deliver a quality job on time.

For more information on ITresources’ Application Management Services, see the ‘Services We Offer’ area of our web site.