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It’s been claimed that 64% of software features are rarely or never used. While this might not be accurate, the risk of building the wrong thing is still present. This holds true whether you hire a full-time team of developers or contract them as needed. A "spike and hum" model, where projects are broken into smaller, manageable features, can help you build the right thing and deliver it when your business needs it.
But once a project is in production, how do you continue to gain value from it? How do you efficiently support it? Even small projects, once released, become part of a larger system. This might include managing tens of thousands of AWS resources, for example, as SevenPico does today. Given that developers often under-document, keeping up with these changes can be challenging.
The solution is a strong project management framework. We created our own by blending best practices from infrastructure-as-code, AWS, and ITIL frameworks. Our organization focuses on processes that cover the full lifecycle of features. This ensures we can not only test but also maintain them long-term. We consider how new features affect the entire system's operations and maintenance. We apply this mindset across our cloud operations and support model, which can be broken down into three categories:
Monitoring, Incident Response, and Resolution
We constantly evaluate the health of critical systems. When issues arise, whether reported by customers or detected by systems, we remediate them quickly. This ensures that your core business, like selling a product or providing a service, continues smoothly. Our monitoring tools detect issues early, notify stakeholders, and resolve problems quickly. The monitoring process also generates an auditable trail, allowing us to troubleshoot and verify changes were successful.
Where a project-minded framework shines: Incident Management. For example, we maintain robust observability of critical infrastructure with custom tooling to monitor key signals, such as availability, latency, and error rates. We then leverage those signals to automatically document incidents, notify stakeholders, and engage support staff to resolve issues. This ensures business continuity and minimizes exposure to potential threats. Our monitoring activity leaves an auditable trail, which improves our ability to troubleshoot and remediate incidents, validate that changes were successful, and continually improve our processes, such as creating self-healing system behaviors, preventing the need for human intervention in some cases.
Maintenance
Maintaining resources may include patching servers, adding security updates, improving performance, testing for reliability, and more. It's crucial to ensure that resources perform well while keeping costs low and systems reliable. Our process includes using hardened and tested infrastructure-as-code (IaC) modules, developed in isolated environments, with strict tagging conventions. We remain aware of exactly what will be deployed to an environment, and ensure that all updates are stable and secure. If something goes wrong, we can easily roll back to a previous version.
Where a project-minded framework shines: Change Management. We engage change approvers, schedule changes during Service Maintenance Windows and document a consolidated scope of changes that tie clearly to versioned software and test plans. We promote changes from development environments to QA or staging environments, and then into production. We notify customers about what to expect during a change. All this ensures that production releases and maintenance during scheduled Service Maintenance Windows will be reliable and secure, reducing potential disruptions and operational risks.
Advisory and Consultation
We provide expertise to help design new features or modernize your system. This includes finding the most efficient ways to implement new ideas or reduce operational costs. Our project-focused mindset ensures we understand both your business and systems, helping you stay agile and efficient. We produce detailed reports on project status, maintenance, and incident resolution. Additionally, we capture and document opportunities for new features or improvements and propose these ideas to you regularly.
Where a project-minded framework shines: Reporting. Our operations generate significant documentation, which we distill into reports sent to stakeholders weekly. We report on standard items like project status, maintenance performed, and incidents resolved. But as an organization-wide discipline, we also continually track and discuss opportunities, and not just during conversations with customers: Ideas spring up while developers work deep inside your codebase, while QA testers validate your features, while we review your infrastructure costs, and even while we analyze the backlog of individual ideas themselves, for “groupable” opportunities. By diligently documenting development work, meeting minutes, system events and more, we capture insights so they can be reviewed and proposed as new ideas that benefit you. When an entire organization is project-minded, it means always having a heartbeat for high-value features that can produce significant revenue or reduce costs.
Summary
Project-minded individuals bring structure, planning, and long-term support to your systems without losing focus on the “why.” Building the wrong thing can be costly by itself, but the costs continue with ongoing operation and maintenance to support that thing. With our project-minded approach to support, we help businesses stay agile and efficient. As your innovative partner in technology, together we can build systems that work now and will evolve with your needs in the future.
