Early Life Support

What is Early Life Support?

Based on ITIL, Early Life Support provided for a new or Changed IT Service for a period of time after it is released. During Early Life Support the IT Service Provider may review the KPIs, Service Levels and Monitoring Thresholds, and provide additional Resources for Incident and Problem Management.
The early life support process is part of the service transition life cycle and taken place after the release and deployment plan and testing.

Scope of Early Life Support:
Early life support is an extension of normal production support and is expected to last 2-3 weeks. This phase begins at the time of go-live. The phase ends as decided by the Process & Service Management Leadership Team (PSM Lead Team) based on stabilization criteria review and business judgment.

Planning of Early Life Support:
The planning of the early life support involves below act ivies:
1) Number of resources required for the early life support determined based on the project size
2) SLA for the fixes based on severity
3) Period of the early life support
4) The category of the issue responsible for the service provider. Example he can’t take responsibility for the environment or Enhancements.
5) The issue categories are:
a. Query
b. Environment issue
c. Data Issue
d. Defect
e. Enhancement
6) Environment access to service provider to analysis the issues


Early Life Support Process:
The early life support process involves operation of the service and triggers the Incident/problem/change service level management base on the issue raised.
Next step is to compare the data against the ELS planned and verify the service stability, once the service is stable ensure the exit criteria’s are met or not. If the exit criteria’s are met end the ELS.
If the exit criteria’s are not met then identify the quick wins, risks and mitigate the risk.

Daily Stand up meetings:
Staff will attend daily, 15-minute stand-up meetings at 9:00 am each day of the first week of service. The purpose of the meeting is to identify specific incidents and determine necessary courses of action. Other topics that arise needing more than a few minutes to address will be set aside for later discussion among the necessary parties.
The meeting should be attended by:
• Business owner
• Product owner and/or product manager
• Project managers
• Process managers
• Service Center managers
• Data Center Operations manager
• Project team member

Communication Plan:
Derive the commutation expectations during early life support with:
a. Purpose
b. Frequency
c. Recipient

Exit Criteria for the early life support:
Early life support will cease once stabilization is reached and the PSM Lead Team authorizes final exit. A final review will be conducted to identify common enhancement requests and/or performance support needs. The end of early life support will be communicated, and normal production support will continue as standard procedure.