For many companies an application rollout is a leap of faith; it does not have to be this way. With some prior planning and the right processes, these tasks can be accomplished with confidence.

The root of the problem is typically how most companies perform their software development efforts. It starts with how they are organized. All of the dependent parties work under different organizations within the corporate structure. The figure below illustrates how most technology organizations are structured.

As a consequence, each part of the organization functions within its own operational silos with limited communication across the dependent groups. And while management might think the organization can function in this manner, its interests are not aligned with the successful launch of a new application. All too often each respective group throws its portion of the work over to the next group. As a result, the last group in the process is the Production Support team who is tasked with supporting a broken application.

Often senior management is too distant from the problems to understand what is happening to resolve these issues. It might understand the process does not work very well, but it doesn’t have a grasp of the underlying issues. In its view, each functional area within the organization executes well within the bounds of their responsibilities. The problem is that no one is responsible or empowered to take charge of the overall task. The solution is to align the dependent functions into an organizational structure that supports the overall business objectives as illustrated below.

The objective is to align the respective functions into an organizational structure that shares the same end goal: “A successful launch of a business critical application.” Essentially, we’ve created a cross functional team that reports to a designated individual who is responsible for the overall success of the application launch. We’ve created an application lifecycle approach “inception to retirement” where the organization structure supports the goals of the business.

This section has covered some of the business aspects of how to organize for success. Please see the “Services” section for the technical aspects as to how these goals are accomplished.