Chapter 13 - Operations Manager's Perspective

As an operations manager you likely have a completely different perspective on the deployment of a new or upgraded software system. Other parties care about whether the new functionality works properly and whether it will provide sufficient business benefit in the near future; you care about what it will do to your support costs and whether it will be sustainable in the longer term. Therefore, your idea of acceptability will be quite different and it should influence the acceptance decision.

Role in Acceptance Decision

It is crucial that your role in the making of the acceptance decision is clear to everyone concerned. Do you provide information to the acceptance decision maker or are you one of several acceptance decision makers who operate by consensus, voting or veto? Or perhaps you participate in the readiness decision before the software is made available for acceptance testing?
As with other forms of acceptance criteria it is highly desirable for these criteria to be clearly defined before the software is built so as to avoid unnecessary test&fix cycles before the software can be deployed. It is also desirable to being able to conduct the testing incrementally throughout the project rather than just at the end. Incremental Acceptance Testing decreases project risks by uncovering issues early enough to have them fixed before the final acceptance test phase which is then much more likely to pass without uncovering any show-stopper problems.

Operational Acceptance Criteria

The actual criteria that an operations group will use to determine acceptability will be dependent on the nature of the organization and the services it provides as well as the service level agreement for the software application in question. The base level requirements typically include: Additional acceptance criteria may include:

Other Considerations

Operational acceptance practices are discussed in Volume IV of this Guide. For a serious treatment and discussion of the patterns for performance and operability, see PnPonPerfGuide and FordOnOperabilityPatterns.