KSOR/BAU/Projects/Investment what it all means

I got asked by one the account managers to explain the split within a production team, before we continue we need to take a few steps back. I sometimes have meetings with sales or account managers asking questions about their products or to answer questions they might have to better communicate with their customers. Some terms then:

BAU – business as usual, keeping the lights on, typically used in terms of funding or ownership, is that a BAU or a projects task, is it carried out by the support team or the dedicated and possibly temporary projects team.

KSOR – keep the show on the road – basically another term for business as usual.

Anyway let us take the Windows server team at organization 7. There remains two kind of distinct ways of structuring the team.

BAU/Projects split – this involves allocating a set number of engineers to deploying new servers, assisting projects deliver their technical requirements, and another set of engineers to BAU or Business As Usual, or in English technical support, responding to calls, carrying out changes to existing infrastructure, with a clear focus on maintaining the here and now, doing all it takes to keep the existing systems online and accepting new solutions into support or ‘production’.

Everyone doing everything (no split) – alternatively the viewpoint is that everyone should be doing both, is there a reason that Giles can’t build servers and do support at the same time? It’s 2010, if he can’t should we not find someone that can, I’ve done a few posts which follow about this.

How your IT structures your team will depend on a number of factors, the ratio of support to investment people, will all depend on budgets and workload, and what works for enterprise A wont for B, and we need to understand that each business has it’s own drivers and ways of doing things, ultimately that the way your teams work is core everything else is noise.

Category: Servers