Going Live : Handover to Operations

The project's finished, or is it?, after the last few hectic weeks of issue resolution, bug fixes and the inevitable compromises with the main contractor, internal staff and perhaps third party suppliers the new system (whatever it is) has 'gone live'. Perhaps a relieved director and client account manager, desparate to return to their day jobs have even signed off the go-live and user acceptance testing ("UAT") milestones, perhaps the switch has even been metaphorically or physically flipped.

A tight, Prince2 project management approach was adopted and all of the outstanding 'critical' issues from the project issues log have been resolved, worked-around and perhaps the odd one deferred or 'fudged' to meet the deadlines. The project board has signed off on the project risk register and there was even time to complete three complete cycles of UAT, to 'dummy run' in one key department for a week, even non-functional testing has been completed allowing us to relax a little with regard to scalability amongst other things.

The project manager looks relaxed now, less than a week ago it looked like he hadn't shaved for a week, certainly hadn't seen a barber in more than a month and had forgotten where his tie, and perhaps even his suit trousers were at around about the same time. Our project manager was hands on and had pulled out all of the stops to 'go-live' on time. Now it's done, one last set of Prince2 milestones, Closing the Project (CP), it's as simple as that ...... isn't it?

Often the rush to 'meet the deadlines' both the supplier and the customer's operational teams are more aligned than they might ever have hoped, there is a singular vision and a common goal, to get the system live. Respective motivations may vary, the client department and project team desparate to meet deadlines, to support the organisation, to 'deliver', proving that complex projects can be delivered on time; the supplier may be more motivated by achieving the milstone which probably has a significant payment milestone associated with it in the contract. Sounds perfect, it might be observed, a working harmony of business and commercial interests?

The 'final push' is an essential and undocumented (at least in the majority of the best practice process texts) phase (sorry ... 'stage') of any project, the risks creep in where the focus is on the 'go-live' milestone rather than the project closure objectives. Deep in the Prince2 process, under Closing a Project sits:

• Confirm that maintenance and operation arrangements are in place (where appropriate)

This is where the essential, and often overlooked aspects of the 'Handover to Operations' are verified. Too often this essential stage of the project is overlooked during planning, and perhaps even the work-products required to complete the handover are ommited from the project plan. As a result, it is often at the last minute that operational details apparently unimportant to 'go-live' are rushed through. ICT Infrastructure Management are all too used to hearing, "The supplier just needs to .....", usually followed by one of a large list of commonly missed operations details:

• .... talk to someone about the backups.
• .... get someone to setup remote support/the firewall/a VPN.
• .... chat with someone about the service continuity plan.
• .... explain to someone where the log files are posted and what to watch out for.
• .... arrange for the nightly 9999TB network batch transfer of very important data.
• .... explain the monthly/weekly/daily/hourly!! maintenance tasks.
• .... talk to someone on the *nix/Windows team about integrating user authentication or provisioning an account for all of our 20,000 users before next week.
  

It is often at the sime time that a similar conversation has just been started with the Service Desk Manager, or worse that the Service Desk Manager is overheard quietly asking someone near the water-cooler "This new whizzBang 9000 system that we're getting next week, sounds exciting - do you think it'll have any effect on us on the Service Desk?, do you think we need to know anything about it?".

To avoid these and other common handover failures it is essential that projects consider the needs of Operations and the Service Desk early and in detail with as much vigour and involvement as they should involve Capacity Management, Availability Management and IT Service Continuity Management.


Technorati Tags: ITIL , Service Management , Best Practice , Infrastructure Management , Prince2 , Project Management