Play 7
Sustainment Lifecycle
The product has been delivered and the product roadmap guides the product sustainment plan. Guidance described in previous plays will have produced valuable “lessons learned” that should be incorporated into the product’s sustainment lifecycle.
Maintain care and feeding of your processes with your stakeholders through good governance.
Ensure that annual funding plans are in place to account for any and all changes, including product retirement and product replacement.
Step 1: Maintain a Happy User
- Review the product’s goals and assumptions
- Are they still relevant?
- Are they being met?
- Evaluate and analyze product analytics data (if not available then look to create it)
- Interpret user feedback. Can unused features be deprecated? Will a new user interface result in increased adoption and user satisfaction?
- Conduct product research. Do other products offer a better value proposition for users?
- Review the product roadmap and release schedule
- Identify new feature opportunities:
- Can the product spawn other products?
Step 2: Maintain Product Funding
- Review your product’s value proposition
- Get ahead of the budget cycle; regularly review your operating and capital expenses (OpEx/CapEx) and update the budget plan
- Understand opportunities to adopt non-proprietary services and products that add value
- Seek reviews from the finance team
Step 3: Maintain Vendor/Partner Relationships
- Review licensing dependencies
- Review support arrangements
- Understand possible vendor roadmap impacts
Step 4: Continuously Improve Your Overall Lifecycle
- The goal is continuous productivity improvement
- Conduct process reviews:
- Ask your team on a regular basis (quarterly) what could be done better
- Seek, conduct, and assess experiments
Step 5: Maintain Product Integrity & Quality
- This is the product Owner and/or the Application Manager’s responsibility
- Does the release and change management processes align with the platform update cadence?
- Review the defect log
- Have the processes that have been put in place reduced the time it takes to remediate these defects?
- Identify and remediate defects during development
- Late stage remediation takes away from new feature development and delivery
Guidance to Consider
- Business Unit budgeting exercise
- User engagement
- UX review (outlined in play 6)
- Industry Analysis of similar products
- Review the corporate product inventory (look for new opportunities)
- US Department of Defense LCSP (as an example)