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During his tenure with an Indian IT services company, a Consultant will at some stage be required to handle Application maintenance projects and perform successful transition (or be part of) from knowledge transfer to steady state. I have received the chance of handling couple of large transition planning initiatives.

 Although the phases, for transition planning follows the standard pattern, a Consultant can tweak the approach based on his experience and the specific project needs and bring some amount of efficiency/innovation/customization.

The below article, provides insight into the Roles of various consultants at each stage of a typical (Application Maintenance) AM Transition planning exercise

The various phases of Transition Planning can be summarized in the diagram shown below:

 

I discuss the Roles of the following consultants at each stage of the Transition Planning:

Transition Manager (TM)- consultant with Project Management, Functional/Business analysis, Client interaction experience

Technical Consultant (TechC) – consultant with deep technical expertise on the technologies involved in the project along with some amount of Project management and onsite experience (more than a Technical Lead)

Functional Consultant (FC) – consultant with Business Analysis/Functional analysis/ System analysis experience in similar domains/verticals

Testing Consultant  (TC) – consultant with expertise in Test planning and strategy on applications in similar domains/verticals

I have demonstrated the roles and responsibilities of each of the above consultants in a tabular form for each phase of Transition Planning

Pre-Transition planning:

Here the principle deliverables are on the TM. The primary Role for the other consultants is to receive as much knowledge as possible on the application and domain from offshore in the form of documents made available by client, Video/audio conferencing with incumbent team.

For the TM, one of the key deliverables is formulating the Transition plan and KT plan and getting both approved from client

 

Knowledge Transfer (until 60 percent completion of KT phase):

TM is the overall owner of the KT phase. TM needs to ensure that the KT sessions are conducted as per plan and contents are covered in detail as agreed during the Pre-Transition Planning phase. TM can receive organized feedback on the KT sessions from the team (via standard feedback templates) and escalate to client managers/business owners regarding changes required (if any) in the schedule or details covered. TM is also the owner of the Reverse KT sessions presented to the client

Knowledge Transfer (remaining 40 percent) and Shadow Support in parallel:

During this phase, KT sessions are conducted for at most half a day with the remaining time of the day, spent by the team reading project documentation and observing operations performed by the incumbent team

 

Assisted Perform:

During this phase, the team executes all the maintenance tasks with support and guidance from the incumbent team.

However the incumbent vendor is still the owner of all SLAs related to the project and will be subject to relevant penalties (as agreed in the contract) for any slippages

TM maintains a consolidated log of all clarifications collected from the team leads and arranges for clarification sessions (if required) before the start of steady state.

The onus on the team (specially the leads) should be to touch all AM related processes and modules during this phase.

Also if the TM is to relocate to offshore after steady state, one of the FC must be groomed to take over onsite co-ordination and client communication after complete application take-over

Steady State 1:

During this phase, a complete application take over is implemented. All SLAs, milestones, deliverables related to the project are owned by the team. MSAs are applicable from this stage.

The primary goal for the team at this stage is to replicate maintenance tasks, processes, standards and client expectations set by the previous incumbent team. The transition should be made as opaque as possible to the business and peripheral teams. All client interactions, meetings should proceed as per project plans.

During this phase, new team members must be ramped up quickly and processes should be defined for knowledge dissipation and training for new members.

In any AM take over, during steady state there will always be some amount of knowledge gaps, but the primary goal for the team should be to keep things stable, fill the knowledge gaps quickly and ensure minimum or no escalations from the client (keep the boat steady)

 

Steady State 2:

At the end of Steady state 1, the team would have demonstrated that all existing milestones, deliverables and deadlines can be achieved month after month. This would result in increased confidence from client managers and stake-holders.

After this, the onus now would be on the team to demonstrate steady application enhancements and process streamlining. This will be an ongoing activity along with the regular AM tasks. It can be measured on a scale agreed with the client managers. Potentially this may open the door for increased billing from the client in the form of new Change Requests (mini projects), up-gradation of application platforms (to a higher version), replacements of existing interfaces and the opportunities are endless. For this, the team must constantly invest effort and time in identifying new avenues for application and process improvements and undertake an initial due-diligence (high level) before taking it to the client for discussion.

 I would recommend a discussion/meeting with client managers and stake-holders once every month on items for improvements (apart from regular AM activities) . This would enable client managers to take the final list for finance and budget approval while at the same time enable application support team managers to assess account pipeline and staff team members accordingly.

During this time, the regular AM work should continue, without any deviations from agreed SLAs and with minimum or no escalations

The steady state 2 phase will continue until the end of the AM contract with the client.

During this phase the main objectives should be to establish new processes, improve or streamline existing processes and make the entire engagement completely process dependent and as less as possible people/resource dependent. 

This will enable the company to allocate new resources to the team and move the existing senior members of the team (who have gained experience on the project and domain) to anchor new projects under the existing umbrella.