During this phase, the team deploys the core technology and site components, stabilizes the deployment, transitions the project to operations and support, and obtains final customer approval of the project. After the deployment, the team conducts a project review and a customer satisfaction survey.
Stabilizing activities may continue during this period as the project components are transferred from a test environment to a production environment.
Major Milestone
The deployment complete milestone culminates the deploying phase. By this time, the deployed solution should be providing the expected business value to the customer and the team should have effectively terminated the processes and activities it employed to reach this goal.
The customer must agree that the team has met its objectives before it can declare the solution to be in production and close out the project. This requires a stable solution, as well as clearly stated success criteria. In order for the solution to be considered stable, appropriate operations and support systems must be in place.
Recommended Interim Milestones
Core Components Deployed
Most infrastructure solutions include a number of components that provide the framework or backbone for the entire solution.
Here are some examples:
• Components are the enabling technology of the enterprise solution.
Examples include domain controllers, mail routers, remote access servers, database servers.
• Site deployments depend on this technology.
• Depending on the solution, the core technology may need to be deployed before or in parallel with site deployments.
• To avoid delays, core components may be reviewed and approved for deployment in advance of other parts of the solution still being stabilized. The operations staff must feel confident making this commitment before the whole solution has been proved to be stable. MSF Process Model v. 3.1 43
Site Deployments Complete Interim Milestone
At the completion of this milestone, all targeted users have access to the solution. Each site owner has signed off that their site is operating, though there may be some issues. Customer and user feedback might reveal some problems. The training may not have gone well, or a part of the solution may have malfunctioned after the team departed the site.
Many projects, notably in web development, do not involve client-side deployments and therefore this milestone is not applicable.
Deployment Stable Interim Milestone
At the deployment stable interim milestone, the customer and team agree that the sites are operating satisfactorily. However, it is to be expected that some issues will arise with the various site deployments.
These continue to be tracked and resolved.
The period between the deployment stable and deployment complete milestones is
sometimes referred to as a “quiet period.” Although the team is no longer active, team resources will respond to issues that are escalated to them. Typical quiet periods are 15 to 30 days long.
The purpose of the quiet period is to measure how well the solution is working in
normal operation and to establish a baseline for understanding how much maintenance will be required to run the solution. Organizations using MOF will measure the number of incidents, the amount of downtime, and collect performance metrics of the solution.
This data will help form the assumptions used by the operations Service Level
Agreement (SLA) on expected yearly levels of service and performance. See the MOF
Operations Guide for Service Level Management for more information on SLAs.
Deliverables
Deliverables include:
- Operation and support information systems
- Procedures and processes
- Knowledge base, reports, logbooks
- Documentation repository for all versions of documents, load sets, and code
- developed during the project
- Project close-out report
- Final versions of all project documents
- Customer/user satisfaction data
- Definition of next steps
Team Focus
The following describes the focus and responsibility areas of each team role during the deploying phase.
Product Management
Customer feedback, assessment, sign-off
Program Management
Solution/scope comparison; stabilization management
Development
Problem resolution; escalation support
User Experience
Training; training schedule management Testing Performance testing; problem
Release Management
Site deployment management; change approval
Posted
May 06 2006, 06:18 PM
by
Damir Dobric