I was just wondering if you can give some insight into setup of your organization. What I meant by that is you guys write code and also provides top notch support. Does all the guys who provide support here work for Solutions Design?

We have some similar model ( with significantly lower customer based than yours) and always find it difficult to balance work load ( and fulfill project deadlines) when developers have to provide support. In these cases, our support quality goes pretty high but deadlines start suffering. Any thoughts about it?

imakimak wrote:

I was just wondering if you can give some insight into setup of your organization. What I meant by that is you guys write code and also provides top notch support. Does all the guys who provide support here work for Solutions Design?

We have a dev team (development is mostly done by me) and a support team. Sometimes the support team helps with dev, but they're mostly dedicated to doing support. This allows more time for devs to write code and more time for support team members to give support.

Though it's key that support team members do development and developers do support: support team members then know better what's behind the interfaces and development knows more about what customers do / want.

We have some similar model ( with significantly lower customer based than yours) and always find it difficult to balance work load ( and fulfill project deadlines) when developers have to provide support. In these cases, our support quality goes pretty high but deadlines start suffering. Any thoughts about it?

With deadlines, it's about what features you want to ship. Until you have implemented them, you can't ship, only move the deadline. It's always better to ship a complete product which is a little late than a shoddy rushed product that's on time.

Otis Wrote

Though it's key that support team members do development and developers do support: support team members then know better what's behind the interfaces and development knows more about what customers do / want.

Well that where budget constraints kick in. Coz good developers are hard to find ( and are expensive). So if you put them on the support also, then it effects their development timelines. Most of our developers not have to jump in all support calls, only very specific ones. However its just that our customers are usually more satisfied when any developers are following their tickets. I know its hard to find a magic formula, but I just doesn't seem to find that balancing point in our development/operations processes.

Well that where budget constraints kick in. Coz good developers are hard to find ( and are expensive). So if you put them on the support also, then it effects their development timelines.

If I may step in in this discussion. IMHO, the main idea is to give support a high priority, similar or close to development, only then you won't consider time spent on support as a waste of money.

And regarding timelines, you should plan ahead for it, and using your previous experience determine how much time (percentage) might be taken from developers time into support, this way you will have support integrated into your plans and thus when duty calls, timelines should not be affected.