Operational and support teams are often relegated to an afterthought of a development cycle, being left out of product testing and training until the project is 鈥渄one.鈥 When a project is finally ready to for launch, operations and support aren鈥檛 given the right information to effectively support the release. Use this blueprint to make the transition from development to 鈥渄one鈥 part of your project plan by defining requirements and ensuring that knowledge transfer is prioritized from the beginning.
No matter how innovative or useful a development project may be, its perceived value will be damaged by poor functionality or disruptive bugs that aren鈥檛 resolved quickly after release. A lack of support through the hypercare period of transition will damage end-user engagement, negatively impact the support and development teams, and cost your organization. Create a process and template that makes it easier for team members to create relevant documentation at each stage, best preparing the service team to support the product launch.
1. You can鈥檛 know what you don鈥檛 know.
Regardless of the method of product development and delivery, communicating requirements and working together to create a holistic approach will improve results for end users and the technical teams. Start your discovery with an awareness of the information and level of support needed to create and improve communication between different technical groups, combining product, operations, and support teams into one cohesive unit.
2. Take notes and take names.
When a project transitions out of the development phase, essential documentation is often missing, incomplete, or inaccessible to the operations and support teams. Identify accountability for documentation as part of the development project, establish which information must be communicated to which teams, and use an easy-to-update template to improve documentation throughout the project.
3. Know what success looks like.
You can鈥檛 know how successful your new support processes are unless you can consistently measure their impact on your organization and end users. Define goals for the product or service regarding uptime, customer satisfaction, training hours, or other relevant metrics to measure the direct impact of a new project launch.
Use our comprehensive blueprint to bridge the gap between development and support teams for successful go-live transitions
91制片厂 an end-to-end approach that optimizes the transition of projects to the support team, breaks silos between departments, and improves end-user satisfaction with product launches. Use our step-by-step methodology, templates, and tools to:
- Identify information needed to create a product profile for the operational and support teams to better know the product and support it at launch.
- Define appropriate touchpoints at various stages of product development and identify the people best suited to contribute.
- Create a template and make it easy for teams to fill in standard information with checkboxes and dropdown menus where appropriate.
- Create action plans for operational initiatives, a training program, and an early life and business-as-usual support plan.