Project Life Cycle - Delivery Stage Support & Support Contracts

he bigger and more complicated the application the more chances that bugs will occur. When you have made a massive investment it is important to have people available during online hours to be ready to sort out any problems that many occur once you go live. There are 3 options.

1) Pay As You Go

You can use a Pay as You Go Package where you pay for just the help you need. This is ideal if you are building your business and the technical response time of our 48 working hours is an acceptable delay.

We will record and manage each Fault / Change for you and let you know an estimate of how long each unit of work will take and when it will be completed. If we need more than the estimated time we will inform you in advance.

2) Maintenance Contract

If you want to guarantee a level of support that ensures you get help within a certain number of hours within a working day then this is the right package for you.

Effectively for a fee you are immune from queues as your support query will be treated as priority.

Each Fault will be prioritised and given a Level between 1 and 3. Here is an example of how this can work. The levels are different per Company and based on their individual needs.

1 is Urgent and needs to be completed within a timeframe (normally 2 hours). This only applies if the fault is raised within the Support hours requested. If you have support between 09:00 and 17:00 and a fault is raised at 18:00, the expiry time for the fault fix will be 11:00 on the next working day.

2 is defined by, "this is important but as long as completed within a timeframe (normally 5 days) that is fine".

3 is defined by, "this is not very important, it does not cause us any undue stress so a fix within the timeframe (normally 2 working weeks) is acceptable."

Support hours will vary per client.

3) Service Level Agreement

If you want to guarantee an even higher level of support because your business can not have any downtime then this is the contract for you. These contracts normally operate over 24 x 7 including holidays. They typically involve a back up system and data mirroing that allows your site to continue without interruption should a problem occur.