Supporting Documentum Implementations – Where Does My Company Fall?

We just had our Spring Documentum Midwest User Group meeting (www.mwdug.com).  For the past 2 meetings, we have conducted a survey on a specific topic and delivered the results of the survey at the meeting. At this past meeting we conducted a survey on how companies are supporting their Documentum implementations. The presentation generated a lot of interest from our members – so I thought I’d share the highlights with you as well as a link to the entire presentation .

 What I found was that measuring support norms is quite complex since there are so many variables – number of applications, complexity of your applications, types of users, frequency of use, how support tasks are divided up, how much development work is done in house, and on and on. I was able to come up with a few generalizations that may provide some valuable feedback for your setup:

•  Number of Users – The companies surveyed had implementations ranging from 50 users to 40,000 users. A vast majority of the firms fell in the middle range of 250– 7,000
• Number of Applications – Most Companies are supporting 2-8 distinct applications
• High level of Complexity – Every company I spoke with gave me a “laundry list” of software layers and integrations that they had done with Documentum. Some of the most common software add-ons used are listed in the presentation
• Help Desk Support Model – Everyone had a 2-tier or 3-tier support model. For details on the different roles/tiers, see the presentation.
• Documentum Team Roles – The Documentum team had 3 primary roles,
  • Upgrades/Enhancements/New Projects
  • Break-Fix Analysis
  • Administration

Typically the members of the Documentum team filled more than one of these roles. It provided a natural back-up system as well as provided the team members with the opportunity to develop multiple skills. It was easier to have a lower number of team members as the # of users grew. For example a company supporting 30,000 users did not necessarily need to have 6 times the number of support staff as a company with 5,000 users. The average team size was the most difficult number to determine. From what I could tell, the average team seemed around of 5 for a company with a few thousand users. 3 of those resources were developers/technical analysts focused on new projects, upgrades, etc. 2 resources were focused on administrative and break-fix analysis. For a detailed break down, including examples, see the presentation.

• Off Shore – Very little work is being done off-shore. 2 clients used off shore validation (i.e. testing) resources. Only one company did development work off shore.
• Consultant Use – Everyone used consultants to some extent. What was surprising was that 25% of the companies surveyed fully outsource projects, upgrades, and enhancements to consultants. More details can be found in the presentation.

We also asked about top support categories, biggest lessons learned, environments supported, Documentum Version that is currently running, and a host of other questions. So download the presentation it also highlights 3 example companies. If you have more detailed questions, or didn’t find what you need, feel free to contact me.