3 Tiers for Support After the Project is Complete

The purpose of this blog post is to discuss the typical tiers of support for a project after it is complete.  This is covered under the TRANSITION part under Resource Allocation.

Support Tiers is part of Resource Allocation under TRANSITION

Three Tiers Plus the Vendor

There are three internal tiers of support and one additional one for the vendor, so technically that is four tiers, but the vendor isn’t always referred to as Tier 4.  Besides that “Three tears for Support” or “Three cheers, for Support” – sounds more catchy. 

These tiers are applicable whether you’re a large Fortune 500 company or a single person organization.  They are the stages requests for assistance with your project’s solution go through after the project is complete and the outcomes are being used by the customer and they experience any problems.  

The period when your solution is being used by the customer is when the outcomes are “in Production”.

Tier 1 is first contact

Tier 1 is the first point of contact for the customer who is experiencing some challenges with your solution.  

Customer contact could be via email, phone call, chat, or through a ticketing system.  

A ticketing system is just a digital mechanism for collecting the type of problem, the actual problem and the end customer’s contact information.  

Tier 1 is first customer contact

When the customer communicates, at that first point of contact, the kind of problem, the actual experience, the date and time of the problem, and any background information is collected.

Anyone who is on the front-line handling that first point of contact with the customer is considered “Tier 1 Support.”  

For a large organization that could be a team of people, or for a small organization it could be one person.  You could use a sophisticated tool to collect the information. You could use a pad of paper.

The goal of Tier 1 is to attempt to resolve the problem using prior knowledge or online or paper documentation.  

In a large organization with a dedicated Tier 1 team, they may support many products or solutions.  Therefore, they don’t have an in-depth knowledge of any particular one.  Their goal is to handle the more generic issues, such as when the customer cannot find the link to the solution, or they forgot a password, or they are experiencing some other difficulty logging in.  

You may have in-depth knowledge of your solution, but understand the different hats you wear, because you will play the role of Tier 1 first if a customer contacts you.  

If Tier 1 cannot resolve the problem, then they hand it off to Tier 2.

Tier 2 is the business team

Tier 2 is the team that knows how the solution works.

Tier 2 is the business team that knows how the solution works

As above, this could be a large group who has developed the solution, or they could have purchased and customized a package.  This team has intimate knowledge of what was given to the customer.   

Notice, that they are not expected to have in-depth knowledge of the actual tool that was used to create the solution, just in-depth knowledge of the particular implementation.  

Tier 2 can walk the user through what they were doing and the steps they were taking and as with Tier 1, attempt to solve the problem using their own knowledge about the system, or maybe some documentation the team has assembled.

If Tier 2 cannot solve the problem, they hand it off to Tier 3.

Tier 3 is the technical team

Tier 3 is the technical team, the ones in the backroom that work behind a door that has just enough clearance to slide a pizza under the door.

These are the technical developers who understand how the buttons, levers, and switches work.  They helped the business team develop your customized solution to the customer’s problem.

Tier 3 usually has in-depth specialized technical training.  They have tools that allow them to see the how the system is behaving using the steps the customer has provided.

Tier 3 is the technical team

Tier 2 doesn’t usually have access to the same set of tools so see what is happening at a deeper level based on what the customer is doing.  Tier 2 may be good at guessing, but their answers are based on empirical evidence.

If Tier 3 cannot solve it then we have a much deeper issue, one that could take months to resolve or may never get resolved.

It could take months to resolve because now the vendor, the creator of the underlying technology has to get involved.

Vendor of the underlying technology

The final tier in the customer problem resolution process is the vendor who created the product that everything is built on.  They are sometimes called Tier 4 but not always.

The problem your customer is experience may be unique to how you are using the solution and therefore the vendor may not want to fix the problem if it is not experienced by a large enough set of their customers.

It could be that after research into the issue they determine that to fix your customer’s problem could break something else used by a larger set of customers and so they may decide not to do a fix for your customer.

If a fix is possible, and the vendor has acknowledged the issue, there may be a delay due to the fix being released with other fixes as part of a change release.  This is their change management process, and it batches a number of fixes and releases those set of fixes at periodic time periods throughout the year.  

They usually don’t release individual fixes, due to complications created on the back end, that I won’t go into here, unless the fix is an urgent security concern or serious product flaw.

Whether the outcome with the vendor is a fix or not, involving the vendor does incur greater timeframes to the fix.  

Inform the Tier Support teams about your solution

It is critical that you as the project manager make all of the support tiers aware of the solution your project is creating long before your project is complete and your solution is passed off to them to support. 

Do this plenty in advance so they have time to ramp up with knowledge and staff to provide the support your customers expect.

Summary

A customer problem process involves a set of support Tiers that the request proceeds through to get resolved.

Tier 1 is the first contact by the customer.  Tier 2 is the business team that has a greater knowledge than Tier 1 about how the solution works in your environment.  Tier 3 is the technical support team.  The final Tier is the Vendor of the underlying technology.

The goal of each support Tier is to resolve the problem to prevent it from needing to go to the next Tier.  

A large Fortune 500 organization may have many people on each Tier.  A small one-person company could have the same person on each of the first three Tiers.

Action Steps / Apply This Knowledge

1. Understand who the support Tiers are for your product when your project is done.
2. Ensure they are aware of the solution your project is implementing and schedule meetings with them for knowledge sharing plenty in advance of your project completion so they can be prepared.

If those support teams have not been made aware of your project’s solution and they are expected to support it, then begin that conversation as soon as possible.

Learn More

In an upcoming workshop, for which you can subscribe to be notified when it’s available, we cover project management examples in detail.  

Also, in the workshop, we go into greater depth on many of the project management items in the Project Management MPM model.  As well you can ask questions about any of your current projects during the Q&A. 

TRANSITION – Resource Allocation Support Tiers 

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