Proper Timing to Develop a Support Team

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Proper Timing to Develop a Support Team
By Jason Boyd, Senior Consultant<span lang=EN style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-language: EN]

With every mission-critical application there is usually a support team assembled to keep the application on-line and running as smoothly as possible. The problem is that usually this support team is not formed until late in the development project, if not after deployment. In my experience, the proper time to assemble and train the support team is during System Acceptance Testing.

Here at J & R Consulting we utilize a collaboration tool called Groove. Over the years, this tool has become essential in our ability to operate effectively as a team. While I could spend a great deal of time describing the benefits we enjoy using Groove, what I would like to describe is the impact of losing my Groove client.

Last week my Groove client began to experience difficulty maintaining communication between myself and the other members of my team. At first, this situation was only a slight annoyance because I felt disconnected from the rest of my team. However, as the hours passed away I became increasingly irritated by the lack of team communication, and updates to individual files on which I was collaborating. In short, I was without my ability to function properly as a team member.

While attempting to regain communication with my Groove client I realized that I was without a support team that could help me restore my connectivity. While this was a minor aggravation for me, if we were a company that relied on a single application for a primary business function, my situation would be completely unacceptable.

The System Acceptance Testing phase of a Project is an excellent opportunity to instruct members of the team on every facet of how the application works. Team members can take this time to work through some of the same initial issues that new users in the end user community will experience. This experience will be invaluable when it comes to answering the list of “how to” questions that will initially make up the bulk of questions asked following the rollout.

In addition to learning how to operate the application, the support team must embark on an aggressive knowledge transfer campaign to ensure they are properly equipped to support the application following the release by the development team. This will include understanding the process flow of the application and learning how to diagnose a problem. The support team cannot be expected to know every line of code, but they can be expected to know the process tree that is used by the code to perform all functions of the application. The support team should be encouraged to dissect the design documentation that represents the “as-built” system. They must be able to understand the terminology and be able to follow the layout of the document. This will enable team members to reference sections of the system during an investigation. Performing these steps during the System Acceptance Testing phase guarantees the members of the support team the ability to interact with the development team at a level that ensures their ability to support the mission-critical system properly.

About the author: Jason Boyd is a Senior Consultant at J&R Consulting, Inc, a consulting firm specializing in LIMS systems, and excels in system implementation, technical design, user training, and system support. Regular articles on LIMS software and contact information can be found at http://www.jandrconsult.com .