Importance Of Service Transition

The importance of a good transition when outsourcing IT infrastructure services cannot be emphasised enough. A poor transition can even disrupt the outsourcing program and cause a lot of business unrest.

Why is service transition so critical?:

• Change of personnel -- either the incumbent provider walks off or an insourced team is displaced (unless most of the existing team is re-badged) -- takes away the operating knowledge which would have built over the years with the incumbent team. Further, the new team will face even more disruptions as they transition and will be more ill-equipped than the incumbent, presenting a double whammy
• Change of environment - servers changing to a new provider or moving to a new hosting facility are bound to throw numerous situations ( often some of the servers would have not been shut-down for years and no one would know for sure how they will behave once re-started after the move). More importantly how to fix the issues that may surface when a server misbehaves
• Tools/Automation Impact : Most often either the tools change and so will require few weeks at minimum (for mid to large enterprises) to bring some sanity in monitoring and escalation. Most tools for monitoring also have a learning curve (self attained or crafted) which build over time. So, in all this chaos, the tools are not there to monitor the crucial times when business is most likely to get impacted
• Differing levels of interest by the stakeholders : While business may be fuming at the decision of IT to change the provider, the outgoing team will (let's say, for lack of better terms) not be interested in a good transition since they are anyway getting impacted professionally and some times personally if they are losing their employment

This is no means an exhaustive list but surely the top ones. Essentially there are too many moving targets and moving guns that come to play. One way to mitigate or minimize the risk is to stagger the transition based on some considerations. If not all targets are moving or if the guns are not moving, it becomes easier. Possible modes could be:

• Stagger across regions/geographies
• Stagger across service streams (say, Data Center Ops goes first, and then End User Computing and then Service Desk)
• Stagger activities (say, the tools will continue from the incumbent till the services are taken over by the new provider's team)
• Stagger across different user groups ( say IT goes first and then HR and then ... finally .. yeah you got it - the Finance team!)

There is no silver bullet but what is important is that sufficient thought is spent on this and mid-course mitigation strategies drawn.