A day in an Application Support Team

Hello!

My name is Gonçalo and I am an IT Support Analyst at Volkswagen Digital Solutions since 2019. I work in the MOS (Mobile Online Services) RUN Team as part of CODE (Core Operations + Development), one of the three Tech Units from VWDS.
In this post I will describe and explain what it is like to work in an Application Support team for a day, more specifically on MOS RUN.

Now you can ask – what are the “Mobile Online Services”?

Well, the Mobile Online Services are the ones that are reachable within your phone or computer, to connect with your vehicle. For example, in some vehicles, you can remotely activate your Air Conditioning in order to have your vehicle climatized when you start your trip. Or if you have an electric vehicle and you want to schedule a specific timeslot for charging it you can also do this through your mobile. Both services are part of our responsibility and you can activate them via App or Web Portal. These are the Mobile Online Services.

However, they are only available for certain generations of vehicles; and also, for the ones that are equipped with the needed hardware, which in some cases must be ordered as an extra with the vehicle.

Now a brief summary of our daily routine…

We start our day by ensuring that every application under our scope of action is up and running and that it didn’t suffer any disruptions during the previous night. If, for any instance, there was an issue during off-duty time, we will investigate deeper to find the root cause and involve other teams, if needed, to help us solve the problem. We also perform routine tasks which are required by the European Data Protection Regulation.

During our day, we split our efforts into several tasks and topics, such as:

• Proactive routine tasks to avoid complaints and customer issues
• Analysis of incoming incidents providing a workaround or solution when available
• Deploying new application releases when required by the Development teams
• Ensuring that our applications are running seamlessly

Nevertheless, our day is not only resolving or avoiding customer issues, but we also work towards the project growth, by challenging the status quo and improving both methods and processes.

Aiming to excellence, our team strives to ensure the best service quality and efficiency.

As the team grows and starts working with new projects, we have more time to learn new technology stacks and to develop our skills. This way, we are constantly increasing our knowledge so that we can have a continuous improvement of the applications we work in, or even for new projects.

Working with people from all around the world to achieve the final goal of providing a better customer experience when using the Mobile Online Services, is a demanding task that challenges our team on a daily basis.

Overall, every day in an Application Support Team is different and this makes our tasks challenging, especially the fact that we never know how the next day will be.