- August 2016
3. Support phase after the project handover
What happens after the
Project handover?
If you have always wondered what happens after a project hand over, then please read on. In this blog, I am going to discuss the activities that happen after the ‘ Go/No Go’ has been decided and the Systems the Project Team(s) have built Go-Live.
I have had the pleasure to have been involved in the full implementation of several IT based projects worldwide and have seen all that there is in this interesting field.
For example, Fig. 1 below illustrates the full end to end of a Project from a Software Development Life Cycle Methodology perspective.
As Post-Production support is the most important part of any project/software delivery cycle, however, after the Project Handover, there seems to be only the Support element, which could literally mean anything from staff training support to system support to training or writing the training materials support. Nothing has been really defined as such.
To my surprise, this seems to be reflective right across the industry and in different fields of Project Development Life Cycles, whether from a Scrum, Agile or Prince2 perspective. To my mind, there has to be a form of mind frame or a kind of simple methodology hacked in stone as how we are going to ‘Support’ the Client who has spent millions of their hard earned cash and man-hours on any kind of small to large scale Project Deployment. What exactly is ‘Support’ and how the Project Teams that delivered the end solutions would be supporting the Client.
In Ksathra Systems, we make sure that the Client/Stakeholder is at the heart of the Project Delivery Life Cycle to whichever methodology we are delivering to the Client, whether Scrum, Agile or Prince2, we always document at the start of the project in the Statement of Works (SOW) the full support we are going to deliver and for how long and what exactly we are delivering and how much, if any, the Client needs to pay for the services we are delivering.
In an ideal world, the task of ‘Supporting’ the client after the project has ended and designing an appropriate road map for this strategy at the beginning of the project falls within the work done by the Project Management Office (PMO) with the assistance of the Project Manager, therefore, providing the appropriate outputs (Products) in order to maintain full control over any project is one of the most important parts of any mission or venture taken at the start of the project by the people who control the full end to end life cycle of the project being implemented.
It is all about generating an environment and conditions in which defined objectives can be achieved in a controlled manner by a team of Project professionals. Approaches to Project Management naturally vary from industry to industry, however, creating a Road Map and full end to end documentation at the beginning of the project for when the project has ended and moves to the support phase and how the Client would be assisted during the support phase is the secret to the Project success.