You are transitioning support and maintenance of a legacy application from the customer to an onsite/offshore team. The customer has asked you to provide a plan for the Knowledge Transfer (KT) phase comprising:
– Number of people onsite (assume New York City), duration and their activities
– Number of people offshore (assume Bangalore), duration and their activities
– Resources that you need at customer site during KT (hardware, software, time from current staff etc.)
– Milestones during KT
– Acceptance criteria for the completion of KT
– Start date for the KT phase onsite and offshore
– Total cost of the transition
What are ten basic (non-trivial) questions that you need to ask the customer and other stakeholders to develop the above KT plan.
Suggested solution:
Questions 1-11 are for the customer; Q12 & Q13 are some questions internal to the organization.
- What are size measures of the legacy application (such as loc)? (correlates to overall support team size and speed of ramp-up)
- What functionality does it provide? What are the most critical of the functions? What are the interfaces to other systems? Who supports the interfacing applications? (correlates to onsite staff) What are the big chunks of functionality? (correlates to staged transition and milestones in KT)
- How many users does it support? Is it up 24×7? (correlates to onsite staff assuming user base in Americas)
- What is the size of the current support team? (correlates strongly to initial size of support team taking over)
- What is defect classification based on severity? What turnaround is expected? (correlates with size of onsite staff, acceptance criteria)
- How much effort in the past year was spent on enhancements and how much on “fail & fix” effort? (correlates to size of total team size and offshore team size)
- Are SLAs in place for maintenance & support?
- What is the basis of planning effort between enhancements and support (BAU)? (correlates to size of total team size and offshore team size)
- Does support include production support? Which of L1, L2 & L3? Monitoring tasks? Report creation? Data fixes? (correlates to onsite/offshore split)
- What is the documentation available specific to support & maintenance? How current is it? (correlates to elapsed time of KT)
- For how long would existing support staff continue to be available to the new team? What would happen to them eventually? Would they be let go or redeployed in somewhere? (correlates to HT elapsed time & quality of KT)
- Internal: How soon can we ramp up in terms of people (onsite & offshore) and infrastructure in Blr? (correlates to start date decision)
- Internal: What is the tenure of the engagement post KT and what gross margins are expected in year 1 and in steady state? (correlates to total cost of KT)
