A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.

City and County of San Francisco Assessor Recorder

Transitioning Project Support to Operations Post Implementation

A key element to any successful project is post implementation support. This process can be difficult when transitioning to a new platform that is not familiar to the existing support team. Also, sometimes a project team may use a different call center application than the operations support team. This can further complicate the process.

The Assessor Recorder for the City and County of San Francisco office is currently going through this process. We are transitioning from a 25+ year old, AS400, flat file (DB2) system to Salesforce GovCloud. We are retaining our existing IT support staff to support the old application as well as the new one. Also, we are also using 2 different help desk tools: Jira for the project team, and an “oldie but a goody” help desk system, OSTicket, for our IT help desk.

Learning to support a Salesforce implementation after spending decades supporting a DB2 based system can be daunting. After supporting a system for so long, you get comfortable. You can answer most questions without any research required. When you pick up a new system (like Salesforce), it is all new and intimidating. You need to research almost every support ticket to make sure you know what you are doing and how best to resolve the ticket.

Besides the normal training we received from Salesforce (which is great, by the way), our staff needed to be trained on the customization our implementation partner, Publicis Sapient (“Sapient”), created over the past couple of years. In order to achieve this, we have gone though many intense knowledge transfer sessions.

We have documented the processes together with Sapient in Confluence which includes audio and video recordings of the Microsoft Teams sessions, where we had our knowledge transfer sessions.

However, no matter how complete the knowledge transfer sessions are, they can never take the place of actually doing the work. As an example, we had never done a code release (deployment) using the tools our partner Sapient used - BitBucket, Jira, and related. In order to learn how to do this, we developed a transition plan. We:

• Attended knowledge transfer sessions hosted by Sapient and recorded;

• Observed the Sapient team performing a release;

• Have the implementation team walk us through doing a release;

• Perform a release with the implementation team “shadowing us”;

• Perform a release by ourselves; and

• Have each support member perform a release (so we do not have a single point of failure).

This proved to be successful. After 2 releases, we performed the next 3 releases, each time having a different operations support team member. We have now performed more than 10 deployments (we are on 3 week cycles).

We are now comfortable in saying our existing support team will be able to handle the new system when the project is complete


The other challenge we faced was learning to use the project teams support tool, Jira, while we continued to use OSTicket as our department was already familiar with this tool. In order to overcome this challenge, we:

• Trained our staff on Jira, forcing the support team to enter tickets in Jira on behalf of the users in order to get comfortable with Jira;

• Monitored all tickets and identified tickets that the Level 2 (project) team was handling that we thought could be moved to L1 (IT operations support);

• Created custom reports in Jira so we could track how we were performing; and

• Met weekly with the project team to stay on top of it.

After 6 months, the Level 1 support team was handling over 92% of all support tickets. We continue to use both systems for support and will hold off on transitioning to a single system when the project is 100% complete (next year).

We are now comfortable in saying our existing support team will be able to handle the new system when the project is complete.

The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.