Not all IT companies are excellent, and this starts when your business partners (vendor) just don’t fit your needs anymore. The quality of services, approach, and a team of professionals may change, affecting the working results in general. In the world of software development, changing vendors can be an essential thing for the sake of your business.

There are lots of things that can go wrong at any point in time during the development of your project. It may be a lack of quality, recurrent delays, and finish a growing number of things.

Switching providers can be a challenging, costly, and risky process. However, if you fail to do so, you can be stuck with an unreliable provider, leading to poor quality of the end product and even more significant delays.

 

The need for an established IT transition management process. The challenges and risks of switching vendors

The industry knows that a successful project transition plan from one vendor to another can take from 2 to 3 months, depending on the complexity of your project. The current phase of the project’s development also has a significant impact on the duration of the project’s transition.

There are some other challenges a business owner should be aware of when switching providers, aside from the time needed for the transition plan:

  • 1.- In case you didn’t know, the company is not contractually obliged to support the incoming provider, leading to your ex-provider not being cooperative. So, you probably will need to act as a mediator, transferring the project knowledge from one part to another.
  • 2.- Check out to minimize the disruption for the most vital business processes, because in the last weeks of project development, after you have announced your plans to terminate your cooperation, the vendor can reassign your development resources to another project, or developers themselves can lose motivation.
  • 3.- Concerning the termination of the contract, the provider must transfer all assets but anyway sign an NDA to protect your IP rights. The reason is that there is no way to verify if every one of your former vendor’s employees deleted the files related to your project or not. The only thing you can do is to make sure there is a rock-solid NDA signed, so you can use it as a back-up and press charges in case of leaks.

 

How to mitigate the project transition from one vendor to another?

Change your project from one vendor to another could be difficult, costly, take more time than estimated but it is important to know which steps are the safest to take to smooth project transition plan.

– Make sure to understand the basics of your project

Because knowing the ins-and-outs of your product/service specifics is a must. You need to know what’s your tech stack, which third-party integrations do your project use, and where is it hosted.

– Develop the knowledge transition plan for software projects that should cover the following sources of information:

  • Project specifications: Initial project documentation would be a great source of background information and will help the new team understand what was going on with the project before.
  • Transfer of assets: The team that you are leaving should hand all of the project-related documents and files over to you. To avoid any misunderstanding, consult with the newly hired team about their requirements (like file formats).
  • Development credentials: To get a full understanding of your project, the new team needs access to your project’s repository, CI, task tracking system, etc. Thus, you might need to create new accounts and make sure to deactivate the old ones.
  • Code documentation: Well-documented source code can speed up the transition process and help the new team feel at home with your project.
  • Deployment procedures: Deploying updates directly to the live application is a very dangerous move. Just to be safe, make sure the new team is aware of the specifics of your project’s deployment process if any.
  • – Any other relevant technical information to the project that should be included in the onboarding documents for the new team.

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