Summary

This chapter talked about shipping a product out the door, including some steps that occur while in ship mode. Furthermore, it detailed how Microsoft does this process. You might want to adopt Microsoft's methods into your process. One thing this chapter didn't mention is that you must calculate this entire shipping process into your product schedule. Many of the program managers in the early days at Microsoft would forget to include this in their schedules, and it would delay their ship date by two to four weeks, depending on how long it took to get through all these steps.