Significance of the domain in your ability to support - Using domain knowledge into daily support operations

Most of us will agree that understanding the domain is critical to production support engagements. The question is what do we do about it, how do we use it, do we structure our transition, our operations aligned with this understanding of the business?

Many of you might agree that we approach by traditional way of using a BA to understand the ‘flow’ and at the end most of the times what you get is the ‘application flow’. Unfortunately, this is misunderstood as capturing functional knowledge of that business. And we conveniently call this as domain understanding.  

I have seen multiple Production support engagements of different sizes and almost always observed this trend. We are mistakenly calling application knowledge integrated with basics of higher function as ‘domain understanding’.

So the question is how do we possibly understand the domain and make use of this knowledge during seeding a new engagement or reviving the existing engagement?

Here are three ideas that will help you build a framework around capturing the domain and make it a contributor in the support operations at different stages of the engagement lifecycle:

Idea 1: Start understanding the domain/business before the application knowledge transition – find the significance of using that product before using or fixing the same.

Starting with an emphasis on the domain gives you an edge. It gives you a perspective of the business and the issue areas, which will enable you to structure the transition and the Operations in line with the requirements.

Idea 2: Use the understanding of the domain to enrich support metrics – I call this Business Aligned Metrics

Metrics is very powerful to provide visibility and enriching these reports aligned to the functions provides you a platform to interact with the business and bring productivity gains early in the engagement.  

Idea 3: Understand the business impact area and focus more energy towards that area – Identify the Business Impact of that issue

Knowing the business impact is critical to focusing your energy in right direction. Instead of making statement like xx incidents in S2, convert these to the functional impact area. The business will love this representation and you would have found an opportunity to interact and do problem management in that area. Enriching the business understanding in these areas will strengthen and make the operations more efficient.