Transitioning to Operations and Support

Lead Advocacy Group: Release/Operations

Transitioning a solution and its supporting collateral to operations and support does not happen through osmosis. Ideally, operations and support personnel have been part of a project team. Being on the team enables them to form a much deeper understanding of a solution and its behavioral characteristic than any training is able to provide. However, it is prudent to allocate time and resources in the various plans and schedules to properly transition solution operations and support functions to permanent staff before a project team disengages.

History shows that a solution hand-off with little overlap leads to disastrous results. Ideally, transitioning of processes, procedures, and systems to operations and support should have commenced as part of preparing for the pilot(s). That way, operations and support teams have significant exposure to the deployed solution and its support systems. Otherwise, how will the stakeholders know that they are sufficiently ready?

Transitioning to operations and support does not just mean that these teams finish deployment efforts. It means that corrective actions, maintenance, and trend analysis of the pilot deployment(s) as well as any production deployments have been assimilated into regular operations. Reporting systems have been set up with support calls already going to the support folks. The support knowledge base is up and operational.

Lesson Learned

Some organizations prepare their operations and support teams only by sending them to training. Although this is a good start, training needs to be reinforced with hands-on experience. Too many times organizations make the mistake of assuming training provides the necessary competency and proficiency.