4. Evaluate

Measure results and maintain the product - Ongoing evaluation and iteration on product development means we can enhance our products and scale our impact.

4.1 Maintenance

4.1.1 Objective

The maintenance period is an essential part of product development that ensures your platform is performing as originally designed and that it continues running smoothly. Catalpa’s maintenance agreement will ensure that a product can serve its users while having capable technical support from the people that made it.

This process provides platform stability as users begin to use the platform in their daily work and supports a positive experience by providing timely updates and improvements. It is an important step in refining your implementation and maximising your investment.

In certain cases we may even have the opportunity to continue learning about how the product is being used and get additional feedback that will allow us to continue improving the product and the user experience.

4.2 What you will be doing in this step

• Develop product maintenance plan and team (a)

• Implement maintenance plan (b)

• Ongoing usage data collection and analysis (c)

4.3 Steps and tools you can use

a. Develop product maintenance plan and team *🥇

• Prepare the Maintenance agreement

  • Some product development contracts may already establish the maintenance agreement terms and conditions. If that is not the case, you will need to prepare the maintenance agreement and discuss it with your customer. You can ask Catalpa’s CFO, Finance Manager or your project Program Quality & Support Lead to help you find out more.

  • Here is a template for Catalpa support and maintenance agreements - you just need to make a copy, enter the details on customer and specifics to your project (such as customer support channels, hours) and some further information.

• Prepare maintenance plan and team (see template)

  • Prepare your customer support

    • Define comms channel (email/whatsapp)

    • Appoint a focal point

    • Establish criteria for prioritising issues, for example by severity and urgency

    • If necessary, create a tool to track issues and requests for support - for most cases a simple Google sheet should be sufficient. See here a template to help you get started. There is a sheet with some instructuons and guides on how to use this template.

• Communicate with your client- comms channels, customer support hours, and any other relevant information

  • Use the Maintenance agreements factsheet to help the client better understand what our maintenance service is and to share with your client so they can learn about the benefits of having a maintenance agreement and what is included. Note that this should not be used for projects using Bero, since the maintenance structure is a bit different and includes a subscription fee.

  • Submit the final agreement for their signature

  • Make sure they are aware of comms channels that will be used for all aspects of the maintenance period

    • Customer support

    • Programmatic or contract questions

  • Make sure they are aware of who is their customer support person and what are our customer support hours

b. Implement maintenance plan *🥇

• Implement designed protocol for maintenance and customer support

  • Find out our standard recommendations and guides for customer support

• Make sure you and the customer support team are keeping an eye on

  • All comms channels - those can be Whatsapp, Hotline, Email, …

  • Project board on Github

  • Issue tracker tool for non engineering/bugs related issues