ABSTRACT

Operations and Maintenance (O&M) is the phase in an application’s lifecycle where it spends the most amount of time and has the most amount of change. This chapter discusses how larger changes are made during O&M projects and how these differ from the initial implementation. During the O&M phase, there will be many activities that will be managed as projects, they may be specific to a single application or they could span multiple applications. There are many activities that occur, or should occur, during the O&M phase of an application outside of projects and configuration management (CM) – release management (RM). CM and RM are managed with a defined process flow with defined steps and decision points for all changes. RM is the process of planning, controlling, and scheduling the changes through the different stages and environments. On a regular basis, the environments may be refreshed from a copy of production.