From the course: Business Analysis Foundations

Project transition planning

From the course: Business Analysis Foundations

Project transition planning

- Regardless of the final recipient, there's a number of decisions that need to be made about what's going to be released. The transition is where you, the stakeholder, and the team are handing the result to the client. The Transition Plan is how we're actually going to put this out. The Release Plan is the what, this is the how. How are we going to place this within the organization? There might be training involved. There might be data conversion. There might be a lot of things. Some of your transition requirements might actually be built into the Release Plan itself, like translating English quick-start guides to French. But you need a Transition Plan, otherwise, you put together a product and just throw it over the fence and say, good luck. A Transition Plan helps ensure the success of your product. Pilot programming could be built into your plan. This enables the discovery of adjustments that may need to be done before a full deployment. This is very common for new products. They're often introduced in a test market to gauge responses and acceptance. Now, you might have a software application that replaces an existing one. You might need to have both the old and the new run in parallel for a period of time to ensure that the results are correct. This is especially important in the financial areas where full testing is not always possible. This approach, though, requires additional effort to prepare the data for both versions, as well as checking the results for consistency. Another approach is risky, but often the only one possible. It's referred to as the Big Bang. This is where the old method, or result, is totally replaced by the new. This requires extensive planning and testing to make sure that everything performs as planned. Usually, in this case, there's no going back. Regardless of the approach, you need to provide new or updated training and documentation for the receiving organization. Usually we train prior to finishing the project, and then we go away. The problem is, if somebody gets hired a week later, there's no training for them. So part of what we have to look at is not just training as part of the transition, but also to provide for training later. You might have to run train the trainer sessions to make sure there are plenty of options for onboarding new employees after you've left. When you think transition planning, think change. For you, this is the end of a long road of living with this solution. It's not new to you anymore, so you might not be sensitive as to how disruptive it's going to be for the recipients. So try to put yourself in their shoes, anticipate the pain points and the resistance. Transition planning can help you ease a lot of frustration and set your solution up for success.

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