There are many important questions that get asked before, during and after the launch of any major enterprise software system. Many of them will focus around performance of the system at a technical level. These are important questions, but sometimes they overshadow another set of questions that are essential for a successful launch.

Launch Readiness Considerations

It’s common to ask if the project team has resolved all serious issues. The difficulty is that for any complex system, the team often doesn’t know the answer to that question with 100% certainty. No system is perfect - expect issues to appear after launch - the question then shifts: Does your organization have the people, process and tools/technology in place to rapidly move through the issue lifecycle: capture user input, diagnose, fix, test, deploy and respond back to end user to close the loop.

People

Do you have the right # of people and skills in these areas:

  • Leadership – who is overseeing your team, responsible for launch and the support of the application after launch
  • Infrastructure – who is managing your servers? who is managing your databases? If you are deploying into the cloud, how will infrastructure support work? In our experience, having a relationship with your cloud/hosting partner can still be important
  • Customer Service (CS) – who will be responding to your end users and what strategies will be in place for listening and responding to their input? Is your CS team large enough to handle the possible volume of input through the various channels your users will be communicating to you with?
  • Development Support – how many people are needed post-launch to rapidly address issues coming through CS?
  • Quality Assurance – do you have enough people to adequately achieve coverage of the system in a short enough time frame if you are needing to do a rapid release

 

Tools and Technology

  • Ticketing system for CS to manage input from your user population
  • Defect Management Tool for Dev and QA – key question: is there a linkage between the Defect Management System and the Ticketing system to ensure that CS stays in synch with the rest of the team?
  • Application Diagnosis: for large, complex systems a distributed application logging mechanism is essential. For one of our large external .com customers, we extended an existing solution in the Microsoft Enterprise Library with MSMQ and SQL Server to provide a query-able database that consolidated logging information across the system
  • System Telemetry and Health Monitoring – we’ve seen Cactii used effectively but also consider Microsoft System Center which is a very powerful tool

Process

  • Documentation to support troubleshooting
  • Rapid deployment process – how automated is your deployment process – can it be repeated reliably or is each release a major undertaking?
  • Mechanism for following up with end users to communicate resolution and give them a sense of involvement with the improvement of the system

All of these things are easy to say, and hard to do when there are a million other things competing for a project team’s attending as it nears launch. But without wanting to sound ominous, keep in mind these things are 10 times easier and faster to address and implement prior to a launch, then after the launch when you discover you really need them. Use that to help weigh out the priorities leading up to a launch.