Executive management has approved the development of a chatbot for your help desk team. You schedule meetings to gather requirements and plan resources and cost. The green light is given and the kick-off meeting generates much excitement. Four weeks later final testing is done and stakeholders have signed off. Go-live is around the corner! The development lead reaches out to you and asks for a session with the application owner so they can hand off knowledge to the team that will maintain the application. “Aren’t you guys maintaining the application?”, you ask yourself in silence. You realized that after go-live nobody will own the application and your team is at capacity. The CIO will hand you your arse back to you soon. You need to move quick!
 

Surprisingly often software budgeting overlooks runtime costs around maintaining the application and keep its infrastructure running. There will always be some adjustments needed to keep an application running. Realistically how much adjusting will be needed? The answer to lays with the team that developed the application. In this situation knowing the minimal level of support needed is critical. Reach out to the development team and ask how much maintenance the application will require and the skill set needed. They will often be able to give you an idea of the minimum so you can quickly find the resource to take ownership.