Tips for a smooth Technical Upgrade with an Offshore-based team
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As you need to upgrade your Customer Relationship Management software or any other key application in your enterprise to a new version, you are going to face some of these key questions. Although it may seem like a quite straight-forward task, you should rather be prepared and review some of these items in our list!  Plan for and establish connectivity with your vendor early on (VPN, client-to-site, site-to-site / credentials for access to servers, and various environments)
Prepare the Statement of Work meticulously (scope, out-of-scope items, timeline, number, roles and names of on-site resources), as "it all goes back to the SOW"
Have a Project Manager, and Architect and a couple of Technical Leads located on-site; you should not have to manage or interact with the offshore team, but the on-site team for the vendor should
Anticipate infrastructure planning (servers, environments)
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Confirm if this is a technical upgrade only (=testing will consist only of business as usual), or if there is going to be impact to your business users you need to communicate about the differences between the old/new versions of the software, and train the business users
 Discuss how will the retrofitting of changes after the repository cutoff happen
Have your vendor confirm the compatibility of versions
Identify early on the differences and impacts to the new system and the User Interface, and communicate them to your business users, so that it ensures a smooth transition of systems for the users
Remember that PROJECT A LA CARTE can provide you with project management support (including Statement of Work preparation) for any of your IT project, or web design services through our partner WebZwin.
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