Summary

A project's Transition phase is an opportunity to capitalize on the success of all the hard work performed during the project's earlier phases. Much interaction with the customer and user community occurs during the Transition phaseperhaps as much as or more than during the Inception and Elaboration phases. Furthermore, end users have little appreciation for the elegant solutions to the technical challenges achieved by the project team. Their focus is on the items directly affecting them. Most of the major tasks performed in the Transition phase, such as help files, tutorials, installation scripts, training, and the results of data migration, are examples of these items. In addition, remember the following points:

• Early deployment, or deployment of the IOC, is an important risk-mitigation strategy. It allows the team to discover environment-related issues affecting the product's performance that were undetectable during in-house testing.

• Be sure to prioritize all change requests received during an early deployment. The focus should be on making existing functionality as flawless as possible, rather than implementing last-minute requests for new functionality.

• Leverage relationships with knowledgeable persons in the user community to aid in the training and adoption of the new product by the rest of the user community.

• Remember that the artifacts and tasks in the Transition phase directly affect the way the user perceives the system's quality. Take special care to ensure these artifacts and tasks enhance the product's image in the users' eyes.

• Data migration is another example of a "project within the project" and should be conducted in parallel with the analysis, design, and development of a new system.