Pack your bags? Not really. The go-live broadcasted our project live in the air but our show is not over yet. The go-live is not the end of the project. It is time now for some on-board services.
After the go-live cutover moment, critical challenges unfold for the end-user organization. They now really need to give up on their old and familiar routines and adapt to new procedures and software features and functions—not an easy moment for them and they need our support. Imagine somebody stepping into your office and providing you a brand new computer stuffed with unfamiliar programs. How would that feel? Just knowing that experts are there to address their questions and concerns is a comfortable thought and will avoid any cases of panic. Quality onsite support will also allow us to advise the key users on how to address specific issues and the support role in general. A good key user team will also filter various support requests. During the longer duration of the post go-live support, the consulting organization can also switch from onsite to remote support, making the consultants available through live meeting, phone, or e-mail communications. This step requires a mature key user organization that is able to control the bulk part of the support requests—another good reason for investing time and effort in the key users throughout the complete project lifecycle.
Assuming that you will no longer collect issues and changes at this stage is like backing the wrong horse. The first days or even weeks of operational use of the new system will produce a lot of issues and change requests. These should be managed by using the same process as in the previous phases. However, we need to be perceptive of the fact that a vast amount of the complaints, issues, and change requests might be caused by resistance, fear, and other challenges of change. That's why we might consider additional communication and training to assist the customer through the reality of change.
The off-the-shelf benefit of having an Operation phase in the methodology is that it enables us to communicate some important things to our customer before and during the project. It makes clear that we will stay after the go-live because we still have some things to take care of.
One of these things is resolving open issues. These issues might have been identified even before the go-live cutover moment but remained unaddressed until after the go-live. We will always have issues at the moment of go-live and this cannot be a reason for postponing the go-live, unless these issues are really critical and considered to be showstoppers. Making customers aware about this before you reach that point is a smart thing and Sure Step will help you in doing so.
So now we have reached that moment, some things to do in the Operation phase. This activity can be found in Sure Step as Clear pending Items, indicating that we need to collaborate with the customer in finding a final resolution to our open issues. In most cases, not all issues are resolved as some have no impact on the business operations. This is an effort of communication and negotiation to ensure satisfaction on both sides. Don't park your common sense outside is the message.
We need to ensure that before we leave, the customer will have access to all important resources, enabling them to take over the control. They need to know the location where all documentation resides, security permission documentation needs to be available for the administrator, actual support information and logs need to be transferred to the customer support team, and they need to know how to log in on CustomerSource" (name of a Microsoft portal).
Once our solution is operational for a few days, it is time to measure the performance and to provide additional tuning and configuration. Real performance bottlenecks might reveal themselves only after go-live. It is smarter to do this proactively at this stage, than waiting for the performance to drop to an unacceptable level, where users start complaining about the performance of the solution.
The time has come to say goodbye. The implementing consultants cannot remain onsite forever and the customer organization needs to take responsibility for their new solution. They can organize the support entirely by themselves or use the operational supporting services of the partner.
To close! Projects are, by definition, temporary, and so they need an ending date. A formal closing is an essential component of project management. Without closing, we end up in an operation for which we are not organized and do not have sufficient budget. Not closing our project will, in the end, evaporate all our profit for which we worked so hard.
We wish it was, but unfortunately we all know better. Closing is where it all comes together and when we say all, it means all. How good were our project communications? How strong was our project culture? What quality did we deliver? What time and cost performance did we achieve? Was our Statement of Work any good? What is the status of our relationship with the customer at this point? Was our project management effective? Is the customer familiar with sign-off procedures by now?.
The project closure is something that you build up in pieces by working on it throughout the entire project lifecycle. Closing phases by means of Tollgate Reviews reports, signing of important deliverables, project status reporting, steering committee meetings, and formal testing results will only make your case stronger. There is a large bridge to cross when trying to get a sign-off, now represents the first sign-off attempt since the approval of the statement of work. We, as project managers, need to understand that project closure is an essential task of our job and that it does not come as a free lunch. We need to work towards closure throughout the entire process.
The core challenge of closing is the review of the deliverables against the Statement of Work. We need to prove that we delivered what we promised to deliver in the SOW and that might be a hard job when the deliverables were not specified in the SOW. This stresses again the importance of the deliverable thinking against the activity thinking. SOWs stuffed with activities will be hard to compare with what was delivered and will open doors for long and exhausting discussions. Buying "something that can drive" refers to which kind of car? Hard to tell, right?
Yes, you need to have a formal sign-off representing the end of this project. To achieve this, we must communicate well in advance and organize a formal meeting with a fixed agenda, ideally attended by the project managers, executive stakeholders, and sponsorers. With the formal signature, our flight has come to an end. We can now disembark the plane and celebrate our successful journey.