Question: Is it possible to manage IT maintenance operations like a project, with typical project management mechanisms including scope, time, and cost planning? In our project we experience difficulties in such a management of our IT infrastructure support department. We don't know how to define their scope, how to control it, and how to make sure that the work is done. They are not developing any software but organizing our server space. Sometimes (and very often) their mistakes severely affect the entire project. I'm interested in finding some formal or semi-formal instruments on IT department management and coordination with the rest of the business.

Answer: 
[ITIL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library) may help you.
The main problem with maintenance and support teams is that it's usually really hard to plan their work in reasonable way in any longer time span.

If we define maintenance team as one which reacts either to problems within project (bugs, issues, inquiries) or to requests submitted by others (client, other teams) it's more like dealing with constant priority changes. If there's critical bug submitted we likely deal with it in the first place before moving to regular stuff. If there are other (major or minor) bugs which have solution deadline they also go up through priority list as the deadline approaches.

However even though it's hard to plan team work in any detailed way as the plan is going to change a number of times, you still can organize process in a way which just takes such situation as given. A very good method to try here is [Kanban](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban) as it doesn't force the team to plan work up front but allows to react to priority changes in a neat way. See <http://blog.brodzinski.com/2010/11/beauty-of-kanban.html> as example of how Kanban in terms of reacting for frequent priority changes.

Kanban also does a very good job in terms of visualizing what the team is doing now, what they're going to do next, any problems they might have, individual responsibilities for tasks etc. In given situation not only may it help you to track their work but also help them to see what they're really have on the plate.

Also with Kanban it doesn't really matter what kind of tasks the team deals with as it wasn't designed with a purpose of applying it to software development only, so it can be perfectly used for the team dealing with infrastructure.