Value Driven Support and Maintenance Model

Generally in most of the enterprises, we have support and maintenance model in which a fixed team is maintained to cater support and maintenance needs (e.g. enhancements, bug fixes and other small day to day tasks). In this model most of the team’s capacity is engaged in tasks which can be automated (e.g. regular reporting) or can be delegated to business personnel with training and nice interface of application ( e.g. adhoc reporting).  Remaining team capacity is used in bug fixes and enhancement. This facilitates creation of personal fiefdom of support managers. Look around in your organization, be is web site, ERP or any other enterprise application you will see the same picture.

Is there any alternative to this tried and tested model. Even, ITIL support model is based on this paradigm.

What about a model where there is no support and maintenance team. Once application is delivered to end users, no one is working on it. Bug reports, enhancement requests keep on piling up. Once pile reaches to a predefined level which warrants attention (or capable of delivering a minimum value or critical fix), support and maintenance team is created (certainly Scrum or some other Agile methodology) and pile is reduced to minimum acceptable level. Once again cycle is repeated.

I like to call this approach as Value Driven Support and Maintenance Model (VDSaM Model).  VDSaM Model will help to control cost in control and also will force team to think long term design interface and reporting requirements in the design of software from beginning. 

What do you think of VDSaM Model?