Type of introduction

A decision is needed on what type of introduction is needed – whether to go for a ‘Big Bang’ introduction or some sort of phased approach. As most organizations will not start from a ‘green field’ situation, and will have live services to keep running during the introduction, a phased approach is more likely to be necessary.

In many cases a new tool will be replacing an older, probably less sophisticated, tool and the switchover between the two is another factor to be planned.

This will often involve deciding what data needs to be carried forward from the old tool to the new one – and this may require significant reformatting to achieve the required results. Ideally this transfer should be done electronically – but in some cases a small amount of rekeying of live data may be inevitable and should be factored into the plans.

Caution: older tools generally relied on more manual entry and maintenance of data so if electronic data migration is being used, an audit should be performed to verify data quality.

Where data transfer is complicated or time consuming to achieve, an alternative might be to allow a period of parallel running – with the old tool being available for an initial period alongside the new one, so that historical data can be referenced if needed. In such cases it will be prudent to make the old tool ‘read-only’ so that no mistakes can be made by logging new data in the old tool.

Complete details on the Release and Deployment Management process can be found in the Service Transition publication

Challenges, Critical Success Factors and risks

Challenges

There are a number of challenges faced within Service Operation that need to be overcome. These include those set out in this section.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 925