Supporting Projects Developed by Someone Else

It is challenging to provide ongoing support (issue fixes, new features, training, etc.) on a project that your team did not develop. The project is unfamiliar, it was not developed to your standards, and you might be blamed later on for poor decisions made by the initial developers.

Here are the top five challenges in providing client support, complete with tips to help mitigate them:

Challenge #1: The Project Is a Mess

The greatest challenge to taking on support for any project is the quality of the project itself. The fact that the original developers were not selected to provide support probably indicates that the relationship with the client was not positive. If the relationship was not handled well, the development of the software probably was not either.