Being that I had some time to reflect on my professional career in production support over the ten-plus years of my career, I had a few ideas that made me feel accomplished while being “productive” in this position. As I reflect on the learning process post-college (which generally, college did not prepare me for the real-world working environment), there are many areas that made me feel accomplished and helpful within a production support team. Being a team player, generally looking for proactive ideas, and creating run books were the three most important. There could be others, but for the sake of this article, I’ll focus on these.

1. Being a team player. What does this mean to the average person who wants to get into this role? Most, but not all, production support positions require you to have an unlimited amount of work. Being able to successfully support all applications that your team has requires each team member to dedicate their time to a specific application (or two) and dedicate their time to allow the rest of the team to successfully support their list of products. While team members will have their own applications they are supporting, I feel if you’ve been in a team long enough, you should understand all applications. Most teams have an on-call aspect and being knowledgeable in more applications can only benefit the whole team in the long run.
2. Looking for proactive ideas. Being in production support can be stressful at times and if all time allocated is focused on passive work (like tickets for known issues, bugs, and/or actual downtime of the application) the main focus should be proactive and not reactive. Your ability to successfully work on the proactive work will adversely affect your reactive work and potentially make the business happier (which is your ultimate goal whether you like it or not).
3. Run books. While this is the dream for all applications, I understand there is only so much time in the day and it’s difficult to find time to create/update these. I know how frustrating it can be to have no knowledge of an application and be on a call late at night just to have to either call someone else or troubleshoot an application that I have no knowledge of. Trying to troubleshoot an application at 2 am becomes increasingly more difficult the longer you have to stay on the phone or chat. I believe run books pushed by managers help create a cohesive team and can keep work on the proactive. There is no perfect solution to every problem that comes up, but the time invested into creating a well documented runbook will adversely affect the amount of time it takes to resolve an issue no matter what the time is. It will also gives you a chance to build a great template as a runbook.

These are only three practices that are effective for any production support engineer and may apply to technical teams. There are strategies that work better for each team based on a lot of factors including experience, industry, and time. Giving your team the ability to focus on these three areas as a goal will generally allow the whole organization to be more successful and application downtime will be minimized.

Let me know your thoughts…