Project operational handoff

This is critical. We need to take an entire product life cycle view for applications. A project should not be considered successful if it is completed on-time and on-budget but causes operational or customer service problems. The integration betweenapplication development and operations needs to start in technical design when the service levels for the application are determined. The ability to meet the service levels needs to be designed into the application and the operational enviroment that will support the application. This integration is missing in many commercially available development methodologies.

The project im involved in at my company is currenrly going through this handoff phase and I find this article quite timely. I think Planning for the handoff should be an important part in the initial stages of any project management methodology. Also setting up templates for handover documents and knowing the kind of info that has to go in them will help flesh out more areas in the technical and application architecture as well as the development procedures. Perhaps we can work together in this forum to define some common templates (like the stuff we have in Techrepublic downloads) for the handover process.

cheers
benjamin

The article is excellent...good summary of the issues and a useful bulleted list. I can forward it to our dev managers, who need the post-coding perspective.

How do I post the 5 rating...here in a Discussion Post? You should have a "Was this useful" voting box in a frame...easier way to collect and collate input.

I'm so glad to see that other organizations see the value of addressing this issue early on in the design phase. Many times developers only see the project from the development point of view. Then when it comes down to going production no one has aclue in how the system will fit into the business processes. I find this especially true with contracted projects. We have some super contractors that can develop ANYTHING but when it comes time to go operational, the IT team is stuck with menial manual tasks to do on a daily basis. We have now established this as part of our system development lifecycle. It works great. But believe me, it has been an uphill battle to get people to realize the impact on any project!