Sustain Your Reliability

Once you've achieved the first three levels of reliability, the final step is to ensure there are patterns & practices throughout your organization to preserve that reliability as you continue to change and evolve your system.  

Key Questions

• How does software go from source code to your customers?
• Who exactly can say yes to a new software release?
• How are system changes described and implemented?
• What amount of your development and infrastructure time goes into maintenance and support vs. new functionality?

It's about Processes

Preserving and increasing gains in reliability requires careful attention to the support and change processes used for the system.  Without the right processes, as the system is evolved to meet new business requirements these changes won't be incorporated in a manner that ensures they don't compromise availability, functionality, or usability.

We typically include some sustainment work in every project with a client to ensure that gains made in each project are maintained.  When focused just on sustainment, we look closely at issues like who describes and approves changes to the system, how those changes are verified and deployed (including configuration management) and how metrics are used.