Summary

An efficient operations and maintenance group can be a powerful ally, enabling an operation to meet its business goals. The key to success is to be proactive and understand the customer environment and the application thoroughly before committing to an operations and maintenance contract. Keep in mind the following points:

• Choose the proper contract type for operations and maintenance tasks. Avoid fixed-price contracts unless you know the amount and scope of work.

• Verify that a new maintenance team understands the prospective system to be maintained.

• Retain the services of the original development team for a period of time until the maintenance team has complete confidence in their understanding of the new system.

• Provide operations personnel with the resources needed to properly support the systems deployed. This includes resources needed for contingency planning and for maintaining resources on call if needed.