Sustainment

Date adopted: 
August 17, 2020
Last update: 
August 18, 2022

When your website or service transitions to the Sustainment phase, you can shift your focus to maintenance and support. Your eServices delivery manager will walk you through this process to ensure a smooth transition.

Department supports the project

Once your serivce or website is live, eServices transitions it to the department service owner and the person or team who will manage it day-to-day. At this point you will no longer need a full project team 100% of the time. 

If needed, your eServices delivery manager will help you get a support and maintenance contract in place with vendors. They will also set up a service agreement between eServices and your department or program area that lays out roles and any chargebacks we've identified through conversations with your team. 

Monitor feedback form input

As the service owner, you will monitor your service or website's feedback form submissions. You can talk to your eServices service delivery manager and your vendor to talk about options for doing this. If needed, they can help you track, prioritize and develop solutions to address this feedback. Focus on addressign issues that are creating the biggest challenges for your users.

Any feedback that indicates a technical solution or development will get added to the backlog and used to plan future improvements to your service.

Identify what to improve

We've touched on collecting and actioning user feedback. Here are a few more things you can do to identify areas of improvement.

  • Revisit existing tickets in your backlog.
  • Conduct user research or usability testing. There is no better way to identify pain points than by listening to and observing users complete tasks on your service or website.
  • Review your analytics for insights into where you could focus your attention. 

Make sure your solutions address usability issues

Once you've implemented your solutions, you need to test your improvements to make sure they work. Your improvements should:

  • work with different browsers and devices;
  • be tested for accessibility; and
  • be quality assured.

Make sure your improvements will not have a negative impact on offline channels or any related services or websites.

Plan future phases for continuous improvement

Once your service is live and you've started to collect and triage user feedback you can start to plan for the next phase of development to continue to improve your service or website. Find out how to track your service or website's performance.

Go back to: Beta testing and live