Thursday, August 3, 2023

10 Things to consider when managing Enterprise Apps - Microsoft Dynamics 365 on cloud - Part-2

 This is a continuation of my earlier blog on the same topic. (link). Here are the remaining of the 10 things to consider when managing Enterprise Apps like Microsoft Dynamics 365.

7. Operations Process Management - Enterprise App Support teams have to follow certain process and procedures. This needs to be well documented and understood. The below is a list of processes (not an exhaustive list) that one must have in place with proper training. 

  1. Change and Release Management process - How the changes and release will be managed and deployed to production.
  2. Incident Management process - How are the incidents reported, triaged, assigned to the support team.
  3. DevOps deployment process - This is for the build and release pipelines process.
As discussed earlier in my previous blog there could be multiple teams working on the Project. All teams need to be aligned and work in coordination. This requires proper planning of processes. The process needs to be documented and proper training provided to the Enterprise apps support team. 

8. Environment planning for Apps support - During the development phase it may be only 1 team that is doing the development. This may require few environments like Dev - Test - UAT - Prod. Once the application is in operations there can be multiple teams that are working together. This may increase the need of separate Dev and Test environments for each App support and Enhancement teams. Setting up of environments can be a challenging task and may require dedicated personnel while also support the application in Production. Additionally there can be a Hotfix environment for Prod support.


Multiple Production Support environments
As shown above in Enterprise Apps support the complexity increases as there are more environments and integrations to manage and support. 

9. Continuous learning - The team is now tasked with learning multiple things. There is a need to train the support team on the business processes and operations. The team also needs to keep updated on the latest cloud and application technology enhancements. This require a rethinking of the enterprise training process. There cannot be just once a year training and done. There should be a continuous learning plan. The managers need to monitor the skills of the app support team and identify the gaps and provide the necessary training path. This way the team is able to improve and support the application. AI and innovations in apps require a continuous learning approach.
A team that is aware of its capabilities infuse confidence on taking on new development and improve the productivity for business.
The method of learning also needs to be changed with social media like Linked In and YouTube becoming the go to medium of learning. This requires innovative training management approach.



10. App Optimization and User experience  - The enterprise application is enhanced with new functionalities added over time. There is the need to optimize the performance of the business application. Also the user experience can degrade as more data and custom code gets into the application. It is a good idea to baseline the app performance and user experience. Once the baseline is done the goal is to optimize the app performance and enhance the user experience. 

The Enterprise Application once live and in production, is like a living and growing baby that needs to be nurtured and managed to get the optimal business results. 

I hope you enjoyed this list of 10 things to consider when managing Enterprise Apps blogs. Do let me know how you are managing your enterprise application. 
Thank you for reading.

@mihircrm 
365WithoutCode