Preparation of Product Operational Elements in a Project

Operational readiness indicates that a product is ready to be applied, operated, maintained without significant problems. A project can fail if it is designed without considering the function in the desired environment.

An important component of project cycle management is ensuring operational readiness objectives are included in the project cycle. Your project scope should include sufficient time to ask questions about operational readiness during project initiation, design, project testing and rollout, and other activities.

Critical Elements for Assessing Operational Readiness

Assessing operational readiness takes time. It's important to create a project schedule that takes into account full testing and product reviews prior to launch. Here are five questions that can be used as an operational readiness checklist:

Staff Role Preparation

When assessing operational readiness, consider the readiness of your staff for product launch. Given the expected project time commitment, make sure you have enough employees to fill roles in the respective areas, such as launch, operations, and maintenance. Take the time to review the employee's performance on their part, after which you can determine if there are any roles that need to be added to the team. Develop training materials and resources while clearly defining communication channels. Your team needs to understand standard operating procedures to be able to minimize mistakes at work.

There are several questions that can be used as material for discussion and evaluation in preparing employees, including:

• The number of employees to be deployed in the help desk
• How to communicate to quickly report bugs to developers
• Train employees to communicate in simple language to customers or users
• Coordination with partners to ensure all operational procedures are carried out

Operational Situation Preparation

Ensuring your operational environment is ready requires a lot of testing and a lot of listening. Patience and humility are required during this phase. Ordinary people may not understand product design as expected. Ignoring criticism and suggestions because they don't understand is not the right choice.

Your product will be used for other people, not just for you and your internal team. Developers aren't the only ones doing thorough product testing. Having worked so closely with the product, they tend to overlook issues that might be salient to someone new to them.

Use test samples from real-world target communities and ask them to provide detailed notes. Some examples of problems that may occur include product disruptions to unclear instructions, or features that can be simplified further so that they are user-friendly.

Operational readiness tests for your environment should also analyze product-related data. Check that load times, reading comprehension, and other elements meet your operational targets. Some questions that can be used as preparation material include:

• Inspection of elements in the product to be launched
• Time to access your product with different scenarios and user types
• Estimated time needed if there is still potential for maintenance

Readiness of Users by Marketing Products

Prospective users need to be aware of the existence of your product first, before you launch it officially. Even from operational readiness involves reviewing your user communication channels for effective product marketing.

Inform customers the time to be able to use the products you make. Explain what the benefits are for them, and where they can learn more. Provide “training” materials to use the product and know the distribution procedure. Delivered material may include user guides, summaries, FAQs, webinars, or quick how-to videos.

Risk Management Planning

Project risk management anticipates errors occurring during product launch and maintenance and plans solutions if they occur. As you consider the operational readiness of your project, think about various scenarios that could affect the success of your project.

Think about user habits, product performance, communication channels and employee schedules. The more you can anticipate challenges in advance, the better equipped you will be to adjust if changes are needed.

Maintenance Plan

Operational readiness doesn't just stop at product launch day. Part of the operational readiness check should include review of the maintenance plan once the product is operational. Your team knows the difference between ongoing responsibilities and updates that are considered routine maintenance with new assignments or major changes.

Assessing operational readiness to ensure smooth launch and ongoing maintenance is a very important thing to do. One thing or another is mutually sustainable, so it is important to have performance on time according to schedule. If there is a red flag, do a temporary stop rather than launch a product that is not ready. Ultimately, checking operational readiness can save your business time, money, and reputation in the future.