Transitioning from a Project to Support Service

Most of the times when an organization has to engage in an Implementation project of a tool / application, there is a fear each time on how would the tool sustain without a maintenance team seamlessly and efficiently? In the IT world - the teams that would maintain tools / applications are known as Support Teams, Tool Administrators, Service Management Office (SMO) and Helpdesk etc.

The role played by the above mentioned teams is not only to maintain the tool by upgrading the system by the back-end support team (involving developers) but to mainly retain the link with the key users. The role of the support team does not end here. It requires a lot of co-ordination and collaboration with the Project Deployment teams / Project Management Office (PMO) before gladly taking over the onus to keep the customers contended.

Any organization that wants to achieve an end to end benefit by adopting a tool / application to serve business needs should take into account the engagement policy between the Project Management Team and Support Services Team including the handover activities. To achieve the same, a few alternatives need to be taken up as below:

• Strong Communication – A very important task that needs to be done daily and with a lot of impact is passing down information not just data or lines of thoughts, it is imperative for the various teams to understand that the skills and knowledge present in different teams differ and that could bring down the whole success factor of the smooth transition.
   
• Schedule – A clear and precise schedule in place helps to avoid conflicts and confusions. All the people who need to be involved in each phase from beginning of the project till the post-deployment phase would have to be made available as per the planned schedule. Most importantly the schedule is a plan to map progression and blockage needs to be captured, highlighted and updated.
   
• Efficiency and Effectiveness – As mentioned above a skilled team is the backbone of an effective application support group and directly related to customer satisfaction as there will be higher changes of First Call Resolution (resolutions being made available to the customer on the first call itself). This avoids wasted effort on repetitive calls as the resources have the talent and skill to do the research and analysis leading to a permanent solution as early as possible. In contrast, a team with only strong communication will not be of much use if the customer needs to keep coming back multiple times in order to get a single issue resolved. Effectiveness and efficiency of support teams also plays an important role in team retention as these are quantifiable metrics and individual performance can be measured.
   
• Development Description – The available features of the application and the performance needs to be shared to the support team to resolve queries and issues of the key users effectively.
   
• Scope – Capacity of the project and the application have to be made transparent for any non-ambiguity and understanding the limitations. The required deliverables and responsible actions list need to be passed on to the support team as well.
   
• Cost – Describing the support cost that would be incurred due to the specific project.
   
• Change Control Process – Processes should be implemented to  account for any changes to the production system and the approval matrix for any such changes to be implemented

All the above mentioned alternatives are good to be followed to have a better transition from a project initiation phase to production support phase. There are no fixed steps to be chased but depending on the nature and scale of the engagement necessary measures and choices should be made to achieve the goal.

About Author:

Dimpy Thurakhia is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at dimpy.t@spluspl.com