Early execution of critical tasks that generally occur toward the end of a project; keeping the engagement with support groups continuous without impacting development responsibilities; and workforce enablement related to learning, knowledge management and collaboration.

IT Assist's objective when working as a member of the development team

One of our primary objectives is to supplement developer's primary focus on customer-facing functionality by dealing with parts of the application that:

• Improves deployment readiness and reduces deployment impacts.
• Makes it easier to support the application in production and the support functionality exercised during the testing phase.
• Incorporates measures that improve problem diagnostic and reduces application overhead.

Another objective is to improve new-member orientation and reduce resource single point of failure by facilitating knowledge transfer and training of knowledge captured from SME, through observation, support cases, design, architecture, APIs and code.

We also work to maximize the value the development groups bring to a project by supporting organizations that depend on the developers. We deal with training, knowledge transfer and feeding relevant information back to the developers in an approach that maximizes the intake but does not disrupt the development responsibilities.

Finally, we lead by example and provide an environment where:

• Day-to-day conversations do not get lost in IM sessions and emails.
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing is not cumbersome and ties into the management of tasks the team needs to get done.
• Information from other groups that add value to the development organization is readily available.

Training, knowledge transfer and mentoring

• Reduce resource single point of failure by facilitating knowledge transfer and training with knowledge captured from SME, through observation, support cases, design, architecture, APIs and code.
• Improve new-member orientation beyond HR to help them get up-to-speed on the application they will be working on without bumping against conflicts of the tasks other developers are already engaged in.

Support to external groups

• Optimize the communication between business and the development organization to reduce the separation from the ones coming up with the ideas and the ones doing the work.
• Help field questions, knowledge transfer, training and other services that maximize the development group's value to the organizations they support such as testing, customer care, project management, product management and production support.
• Open the communication flow through online discussion with production support and customer care to track and implements ways to improve the product in areas where the value of the improvement exceeds the cost.

Development group support

• Perform any groundwork required to successfully kick-start a development project such as technology research, internal information gathering, documenting potential risks, researching available frameworks and alternate approach determination.
• Look at successful projects and analyze why they were successful and, similarly, look at failed projects to learn from mistakes then codify all these lessons learned into best practices and processes for the group's knowledge base.
• Help handle tasks such as production support handoff material development, application monitoring design and execution, troubleshooting process documentation, support tool development, error condition documentation and other tasks that guarantee future success of the application while the developers are under the gun to develop the product's functionality.
• Foster an environment that promotes a workspace that personnel can stay connected to anytime to post questions, share screenshots, get feedback, troubleshoot code, record raw information captured in meetings, log notes, ideas etc that is a opened to other groups.