Lessons Learnt - Application Support Project Transition

After transitioning Test, Support Projects in my previous roles. Below listed are activities involved for a project transition. From the management perspective when the project is signed off, statement of work is defined. Initial team setup is the important period.

Application Support - Project Transition

Nature of work for Application Support

• Deploying build in environments (Test, UAT, Production)
• Production Outage management
• Production Monitoring
• Incident and Change Management
• Coordination with other team to resolve DB, Network issues (Other than Application Issues)
• Perigrine is one Incident management tool that I worked with

Identifying Resources 

• Identifying resources for the projects (Entry level, Mid, Senior)
• Identifying managers for the projects
• Hiring –Team setup and hiring involving the client and managers

Typically KT (Knowledge Transfer) involves 

• Walk thru Sessions
• Understand the support model
• Understand the Application, Technology Architecture
• Onsite Travel for senior resources
• Reviewing and understanding documentation of current application
• Shadowing of resources, Client does the work, On-boarding team will shadow (Primary Shadowing)
• Publish learning and understanding documents
• Milestones would be set to cover the related applications (Walkthru, Demo, Deployment in Dev Environments)
• Secondary Shadow. Client monitors when we do the actual work

Ramp-up of Team

• Typically team would be involved supporting Severity2, Severity3 issues to start with
• In a defined time frame 1-2-3 months the team would be ramped up to handle the complete application 

Metrics Measured
In all phases of transition and post transition metrics play a key role with respect to revenues :)

• SLA is associated with tickets of each priority. Number of tickets successfully resolved within SLA
• Number of tickets successfully closed Vs Number of tickets received in queue
• Production Deployments handled

This is based on my experience on transitioning application support projects. There are other additional areas for Network Monitoring, DBA transitioning teams which is not covered in this blog post.

Happy Reading!!!