How to transition to support
The long-term viability of your new solution depends on how smoothly you transition it from your implementation team to your support team. In the heat of a go-live, many companies do not give enough time for this transition. As a result, they end up keeping their implementation team on the project for a much longer time after their go-live. With some planning upfront, the pain and cost of the support transition can be minimized.
The transfer of anything involves two parties - the source and the target - working together for a period. One party knows the subject matter. The other needs to learn it. The two parties need to have enough time to enable knowledge transfer. In this sense, a transition to support involves both the implementation and the support teams. They will need to work together for some time. When to trigger this transfer, how long to keep the teams together, and how to conduct the transition process are all important points to consider.
The support team does not need to wait for the go-live to engage with your project. You can bring them in a few weeks before and overlay it with your implementation team. The support team can review the documentation, get familiar with the business operations and ramp up their knowledge of the solution. This early engagement also benefits the consulting team. As we all know, the go-lives are hectic. Support can provide the additional hand-holding your business needs. We discussed how important it is to resolve issues quickly during and post go-live in another blog. Support can offer the much-needed bandwidth to gain speed on the issue resolution.
Both teams need to work together post-go-live as well. Generally, an implementation team stays on until the first key milestone is achieved using the new system - for example a financial close in an ERP project. The time period from the go-live to this key milestone is sometimes referred to as the hyper-care period. At the end of hyper-care, the implementation team can disengage, and the support team can step in. The routing of any issues should be switched from the implementation to the support resources. As the implementation team phases out, the support team becomes the primary source of issue resolution.
In multi-phase deployments, an interesting dynamic between the implementation and support teams may arise. After the initial go-live, you may have your support team supporting the first phase of the project while your implementation team is working on the second phase. This requires close coordination between the two groups. A fix that is developed by the support team to address a production issue must be coordinated with an enhancement developed by your implementation team to meet a unique business requirement. Management of the codebase can get out of hand quickly unless these two teams work together.
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My name is Cem and this has been another gem.
