We take initiative and ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
Transfer to Managed Services
Why
At Kabisa it is the Managed Services department that has control over, and gives support on, production environments. In order to give good support on a release, Managed Services must have good knowledge of the product before a release is done.
Prepare for success
Have someone from Managed Services involved during the development project. This should at least be done by frequent participation in the Daily Standup, performing code reviews, and/or fixing bugs. For certain projects, the best way is to add someone from Managed Services to the development team for a number of Sprints.
How
As soon as it is known that a release is coming up, plan the knowledge transfer with Managed Services. How much time this needs, will heavily depend on the degree of involvement of Managed Services in the development project.
Definition of Done[1]
Managed Services is confident to go live with the release, and ready to give support on the release.
Real Life Example
With one industrial customer of Kabisa, we developed a mobile app to interact with remote hardware via their generic I/O module. It was not a complex app, and it was built on a framework that is very well known within the Managed Services department. However, the specifics of the existing API, and the generic application of the module (analog & digital I/O), had already turned out to be difficult in knowledge transfer when a developer was replaced during the project. Therefore we planned a full day of knowledge transfer with one developer from the project and two developers of Managed Services. This was done a week before the first go-live of the app.
