Introduction

The Technical manager and Application Manager are not ITIL® roles. Technical Management is a function in the Service Operations phase of the ITIL lifecycle. However, in the IT industry we use the term ‘technical manager’ to denote a person who plays the role of managing a team of technicians in the infrastructure space. For the purpose of this questions below we will assume that the technical manager role is as per the above definition.

Similarly, the role of Application Manager is attributed to a person who owns the applications. They are expected to own and drive all the activities pertaining to the application, which may include servicing the application as well, e.g. performing application management services.

The below Q&A will help prepare the reader to answer interview questions pertaining to the latest concepts in technology.

1. As a technical manager, what are your daily duties?

Following is a list of the activities that a technical manager may need to do daily:

• Manage the team of technicians
• Assist the technical team in resolving Complex technical issues
• Provide inputs to the problem manager during the investigation of a problem
• Provide inputs to the incident manager during the resolution of an incident as required
• Participate in the major incident process by providing the necessary inputs and technical expertise for the infrastructure of the impacted Configuration Items
• Ensure that the infrastructure SLAs are being fulfilled e.g. availability, capacity, resilience
• Create reports for the management
• Design and implement dashboards so that the appropriate it stakeholders are able to monitor the status of the infrastructure on a need basis
• Keep up to date on the latest technologies relevant to the IT service – propose these as a part of the Continual Service Improvement initiatives.
• Reduce the efforts spent on repetitive reporting to various stakeholders.

2. What is the role of Technical Management in an ITIL organisation?

The Technical Management function plays two major roles in an ITIL organisation:

1. It is the custodian of technical knowledge and expertise related to managing the IT infrastructure. It ensures that the knowledge required to design, test, manage and improve IT services is identified, developed and refined
2. Technical management also provides the staff to support the ITIL lifecycle. It ensures that resources are effectively trained and deployed to design, build, transition, operate and improve the technology required to deliver and support IT services

The requirements for technical management are defined in the Service Strategy phase. expanded in Service Design, validated in Service Transition and will also be refined in Continual Service Improvement.

The Technical Management function also strikes a balance between the skills, utilisation and the cost of the technical resources. E.g. having an expensive resource with excellent technical skills may not be suitable if there is not enough work for this role. The function can then decide whether it should SET up a robust knowledge management process, establish knowledge artefacts, and then hire contractors to do the work as per the resource forecast.

Technical management also provides GUIDANCE to its operations teams about how best to carry out the ongoing operational management of Technology.

3. Have you heard of Technology Change Management (TCM)? What are its objectives?

TCM is a process of identifying, selecting, and evaluating new technologies (such as tools, methods, and processes) to incorporate the most effective technology in a software system.

An organization would typically establish a TCM group that shall be responsible for assessing emerging technologies and managing changes that occur in existing technologies. The technologies that tend to improve the capability of the standard software process of the organization are top priority.

TCM helps in maintaining awareness of new technologies in an organization. It assists organizations in selecting the most appropriate technology to improve the software quality and productivity in IT. Before incorporating new technologies in the organization, both advantages and disadvantages of implementing the technology are checked with the help of a fail-fast prototype that helps to assess the impact and returns from the new technology. The selected technology stack most suitable for the organization are proposed, and upon management approval, incorporated into the standard software process of the organization.

In addition to the above-mentioned objectives, other common objectives of TCM are:

• Minimize Total Cost of Operation (TCO)
• Formulate policies related to usage of existing or LEGACY technology
• Identify reasons for discontinuity and delay and replace with better project management practices
• Maximize asset utilization and reduce inventories
• Reduce expenses by performing intake check and evaluation prior to use

4. What do you understand by Technology Management?

Technology Management is the use of technology for human benefit. It covers the entire cycle of planning, design, optimization, operation and control of technological products, processes and services. It also includes managing of technical personnel. Technology management programs typically include instructions in production and operations management, project management, computer applications, quality control, safety and health issues, statistics, and general management principles.

Technology innovations follow the form of an "s" curve though originally based upon the concept of standard distribution of adopters. In broad terms the "s" curve suggests four phases of a technology life cycle – emerging, growth, mature and aging.

These four phases are coupled to increasing levels of acceptance of a new technology. In recent times for many technologies an inverse curve – which corresponds to a declining cost per unit is also depicted. The inverse curve is found to suit innovation in the domain of information technology when initial investments in the new technology are high.

The Carnegie Mellon Capability Maturity Model proposes that a series of progressive capabilities can be quantified through a set of threshold TESTS. These tests determine repeatability, definition, management and optimization. The model suggests that any organization must master one level before being able to proceed to the next.

Gartner has popularised the Hype cycle, which suggests that marketing of new technology results in the technology being over hyped in the early stages of growth.

5. How would you plan for Technology Change?

The following steps are likely to increase your success at implementing technology change: 

1. Find the right technology platform – There are a few things you should consider in a new technology solution. It should facilitate integration with existing platforms, provide ease of use (user interface), and offer product features that you really need. Time must be invested to research, conduct surveys, consider the pros and cons and get informed before selecting a new technology.
2. Lead from the top – The leadership team must set an example by embracing the change, and by providing clear and specific examples about how the technology will make life easier and simpler.
3. Acquire knowledge – Treat your technology partner as being most knowledgeable about their products and as to how to get the most out of the platform. LEVERAGE their expertise as an enabler for the change you wish to adopt through training and consulting.
4. Communicate – Technology change management leaders should work together to develop a solid communication plan and convey a consistent message. This plan must include answering of all questions and alleviating concerns and explain how the new platform may impact team members.
5. Create a measurable plan – Dumping a new technology on a team and expecting it to learn new business processes and adapt to it is not a reasonable expectation. Incremental, measurable goals for the implementation and the use of the new technology must first be developed and assigned to the team members and then hold people accountable to fulfil them.
6. Review and adjust progress – Implementation plans must have flexibility inbuilt – this makes it adaptable to roadblocks as well as positive risks that make the actuals go faster than planned.
7. Listen – Management must make the time and efforts to listen to the concerns of employees, ask questions, and address them to keep everyone on target. Listening to and addressing the concerns make people move forward faster.

6. What is Application Lifecycle Management?

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a whole gamut of activities across different disciplines that traditionally were considered in isolation – project management, requirements management, development, testing and quality assurance (QA), customer support and IT service delivery.

Before Agile came onto the scene and organizations realized that their previous waterfall approach to software development was inefficient and prone to scope creep, cost overruns and missed deadlines, each of the disciplines that made up the overall software process was separate. 

Organizations realized the efficiency of integrated teams that collaboratively define the requirements, plan the releases and sprints, test the product during development and deploy the latest update. ALM is basically the fusing together of all these disciplines with all aspects of the software delivery process. E.g. instead of business analysts working in isolation to define the vision and requirements and providing ‘requirements document’ to the developers, who in turn would ‘hand-off’ code to the QA and then finally the tested code being handed over to the support and operations team – the whole flow is integrated using ALM.

The ALM enables functionality and new features to be continuously delivered in short cycles of a few weeks each rather than after many months or years.

7. How does application management impact IT services delivery?

Application management ensures that the IT organisation has access to appropriately skilled staff whenever required. As part of application management, the knowledge that the staff needs to possess is identified, developed and refined. Staff will first be trained on technical as well as functional aspects of the application and then they will be deployed into service delivery.

One of the important factors to keep in mind is that a balance must exist between skill levels vis-a-vis the cost of the resources. Decisions must be taken around, whether to staff the service delivery with in-house staff or contractor staff or whether to keep a centralised pool of resources. Once the resources are trained and deployed onto delivering services, the application manager must ensure that the resources are optimally utilised. Optimal utilisation of resources becomes even more important if expensive contract staff has been deployed. Utilisation is usually one of the key KPIs of application management function.

The responsibility for developing new applications lies with IT application development. However, application management will contribute to a buy or bill decision. They will also provide guidance to the IT operations team in matters related to the applications and provide information on the functionality that is implemented within the application.

8. Who performs application management in an organisation?

Application management can be performed by any department or a team involved in managing and supporting operational applications. Applications that have been sunset (or retired) do not form a part of the active application management function. The application management team plays an important role in the design, testing and improvement of applications that provide IT services to the customers and the users. Application management may be involved in development projects to the extent of providing information related to interfaces and lessons learnt from managing existing applications.

Application management teams possess expertise regarding the functionality implemented by the applications. The teams may also have functional experts on-board, e.g. an IT application which is part of a supply chain may have domain experts on sales and distribution. Of course, there will also be the technical experts who will know how the functionality has been implemented in executable code. Application management teams are specialised teams and therefore sharing of staff across different applications may prove to be difficult.

Application management teams act as the third level of support for the incident management and problem management processes. They will provide expert inputs to resolve incidents and problems.

9. How do the Application Management teams get involved in Change Management?

Any changes to the functionality provided by an application must be controlled by a change management process. In an enterprise, applications will not exist in isolation; it is most likely that any changes to one application may have an impact on another. During the impact analysis process for changes (a part of change management), the change manager must analyse these interdependencies using the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and involve the relevant application managers to assess the impact of change on their respective applications. If there is a change that affects multiple applications, the efforts and cost expended by these application management teams to implement the change must be included in the efforts and cost estimates for the change (and budgeted accordingly).

Application managers should be invited to the Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings by the change manager. It may so happen that a change cannot be implemented by an application management team because of another change which is work in progress. Unless these interdependencies are identified, change management cannot be successful or will not produce the desired results.

Since application management teams possess specialised knowledge related to the applications, they may also perform application development work limited to changing existing code. This may be very useful in a situation where changes must meet strict timelines and there is no time available for knowledge transfer to new members. It also helps to utilise any available bandwidth within the application management team. The quality of deliverables should be better as the changes are performed by staff that are knowledgeable of the application.

10. How does the application management function meet its objectives?

The application management function is responsible for ensuring that applications are well designed, resilient and cost-effective. A properly designed application operates with minimum disruptions. This in turn reduces the number of incidents and down time, resulting in a happier customer and user. Resilient applications are fail-safe and keeps the failures transparent to users of the applications and users perceive that the applications are running smoothly. A cost-effective application is the one where the total cost of ownership (TCO) - staff required to manage IT, software and hardware costs, cost of poor quality, degree of automation etc. is optimal.

Every application implements functionality that satisfies certain business objectives. Application management function needs to ensure that these functionalities provide by the applications remain available to the users. Managing applications require technical and functional expertise. By maintaining a pool of resources that have the necessary technical and functional expertise, the application management function ensures that any technical failures that occur can be speedily diagnosed. Technical failures arrive at the application management team via the Incident Management process where they play the role of the third level of support.

Due to the changing business scenario applications will need to evolve over a period, by introducing new functionality or modifying the existing ones. Application management function provides the staff and expertise necessary to estimate and assist the application development team in the implementation of changes.

This is how the application management function meets its objectives.