Applications transition. How do we take applications for support

A bit about us, the customer, projects and history

A team in our company provides application support for 80+ applications of a German customer. Over 5 years of cooperation we have established a relationship of trust. About once a year the customer calculates its expenses, sees how much it pays for the team and assesses the quality of our work and decides whether to give us another dozen of internal applications for outsource.

Our client is a major producer of servers and office equipment. Applications given to us are mainly designed for accounting, sales, orders and reporting planning on different levels. We also support the internal corporate SharePoint portal and everything connected to it in a large organization (staffing, document management, etc.).

Our team provides 2nd, 3rd and 4th lines of support for SharePoint and .NET applications. We resolve incidents, fix problems and bugs and change application code, when necessary. We also did the development from scratch, but that’s a story for another article.

Over these five years we have conducted knowledge transfer 4 times and gained experience we want to share. Internal practices on planning the transfer to fit into the budget and schedule and avoid problems in the future, when the service starts.

Planning the service transfer

Before go over to planning we request two documents:

1. service description for each application;
2. questionnaire for each application.

For each of the transferred applications we plan:

• regular session of knowledge transfer;
• deployment of application development environment, code analysis;
• drawing up or updating of documentation (business processes, test plans, etc.);
• review of incidents and problems, creation of a knowledge base on incidents;
• work on incidents in the current support group (they do the job and we observe);
• knowledge transfer to a support team;
• work under the supervision of the current support group (we do the job and they cover).

Planning of the service transfer is similar to a conventional project plan. The difficulty is that you set yourself the precise point to which you can get in the analysis of an application. How closely will you review the code, how seriously will you understand the business processes, how well you are going to reproduce the application environment.

Find out more about phases of service transfer in our blog on Habrahabr.