Case for employee motivation in IT Maintenance and Support projects

Projects in the software service sector fall into the following broad categories - consulting, implementation, upgrade/migration, IT maintenance and support. A mature IT service organisation will be executing projects under all the above categories at any given point of time. Studies show that a large chunk of the work carried out in India fall under the last two categories of IT Maintenance and support. The nature of maintenance and support projects (especially the latter) is much different from an implementation or pure consulting. Support projects are in most cases long term engagements that involve the monitoring and maintenance of the existing IT infrastructure of a client. This is not high end work and in most cases involves going through or executing a series of predefined sequence of actions to accomplish a task. Moreover a number of systems being supported are highly stable, and thus will not involve any significant technical intervention nor creative problem solving. Thus, a maintenance and support project in most cases reduces to a laborious routine monitoring job. Moreover, the scope of learning is limited by the system itself, project associates have to act within the boundaries of the client IT system and rarely get an overall view of the implementation life cycle or the intricacies of technology as majority of the time they are required only to work on the already developed system.
So it is little wonder that employees look down at IT maintenance and support projects. Considering the narrow scope of learning and the drab nature of work, this type of projects are the least preferred in the IT industry. Typically because of this motivation of employees involved in a maintenance and support project need to be given special attention.
The argument of this thesis is the following:
Software engineers involved in a development/ implementation project have an internal motivation due to the sheer nature of challenges offered by the work. Moreover these projects offer significant learning opportunities which will go a long way in enhancing the future career prospects of the associates involved. At the same time IT maintenance and support projects offer very limited learning avenues and offer a monotonous work environment. Lack of meaningful work, engagement in repetitive tasks and closed learning opportunities will automatically drive down motivation of employees involved in this kind of projects. Thus it is my argument that special attention need to be given to maintenance and support projects to ensure that proper employee development and motivation thrives. The organisation has a responsibility towards building the careers of its associates. Employees cannot be seen as a medium to achieve a better bottomline, it is their value creation activities that pump in revenue. Thus, as project allocation is a pejorative of the organisation and as an employee involved in a maintenance and support project could have been well part of a development project, it is the responsibility of the organisation to ensure that associates in a maintenance project are not handicapped by a lack of adequate learning opportunities.