Notify the customer

Finally the moment you look forward to, telling the customer the application is in production and all the new features and fixes are available for them to use. You might have an opportunity to tell them in person if you are on-site. If you are implementing after hours and they already went home for the night you might just leave a hand written note on their desk. Remote implementations present a different challenge. Typically we open an instance of Notepad and leave a quick message that we are finished with the implementation.

A follow up e-mail and phone call are also important telling them the status of the implementation. Hopefully you inform them all went well and the application is ready for their use. Sometimes things do not go well and you need to tell them the application is the same one they have been using previously, or if new, that the application is not yet installed.

Provide documentation of exactly what was installed from a feature set point of view. The documentation we like to provide is a Word document detailing all the changes made, both new features and bug fixes (see Figure 3 ).

Figure 3. This is an example of documenting release history for an application.