How often we encounter issues or incidents of similar nature or from the same area, in our production system? May be quite often and we make a quick fix or pick up a solution from our known error database, depending on the complexity and severity of the issue and think that the job is done. More often than not these are reactive approach. For such issues that are of recurring nature we can find a proactive solution mechanism. It will help the organization to save the time and money being spent on these and it will see a healthier production environment.
The steps to follow can be:
- Doing a Pareto analysis: To identify 80% of your issues in the 20% area and targeting them as your area of concern.
- For them you can do RCA (Root Cause Analysis) and brain storm to find a viable option to completely do away with the issue or replace it with a more efficient solution altogether. It may not be possible for all areas and in many cases it may not be beneficial cost wise. But definitely it will help to arrive at a better solution.
- The Unit test, Integration test, Regression test, Quality Assurance methodologies and Scopes can be revisited and if it is needed they can be broadened so that issues can be uprooted from the grassroots level.
- Do regular sanity checking and have exclusive resources for them. It will help in monitoring and maintaining application wellness.
- Keep a tab on the latest developments in the Technology and related infrastructure sector and if required go for a suitable implementation.
- Special care should be taken during project go lives and releases as they touch upon a stable environment.
- There should be a robust document management system so that all application changes are well documented so that any future change takes due care so that it does not alter something already working fine.
Still we will have issues to solve, but it will be lessened by many of the recurring ones.
Depending on the kind of sector the list can be made exhaustive.
This can be applied not only to SAP but also the cross applications that exist in an organization.
