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 as a team enjoy by 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 began to become increasingly irritated by the lack of team communication, and updates to individual files that I was collaborating on. 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 I were a company that relied on a single application for a primary business function, my situation would be completely unacceptable. With every mission critical application there is usually a Support Model developed to keep the application running as smoothly as possible. The problem is that usually this Support Model is not formed until late in the development project, if not after deployment. In my experience the proper time to develop the Support Model and staff the team is during System Acceptance Testing.

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 time to answer 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 in order to ensure that 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 the 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 produced 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 the team to reference sections of the system during an investigation. Performing these steps during the System Acceptance phase guarantees the members of the support team the ability to interact with the development team at a level that will ensure their ability to properly support the mission critical system.