Software transition: recipe for a disaster

Everyone knows that software has a life cycle and dies at some point. If your software is part of your day to day operations, you can't fail in managing its transition. If you want to reduce the probability of success of the transition, here are some rules to follow:

1. Don't plan transition
2. Don't communicate transition plan if you have one
   
3. Promote non-skilled people to decision positions
   
4. Kill initiative/ignore message (ex: kill messenger and think the problem is gone)
   
5. Avoid long term planning (ex: use argument like business moving too fast)
   
6. Don't put a technical team lead
   
7. Don't do follow-up of team requests
8. Don't involve HR to smooth transition
9. Don't hire pro-actively
10. Don't prepare a B plan
11. Don't involve and/or update your team on the transition plan
12. Don't give overall project responsibility to anyone
    
13. Stay in a reactive mode
14. Don't communicate info in daily meeting
15. Don't ensure you have a good pulse of your team
16. Give too much power to people who don't understand software process
    
17. Like Greenspan, dream the magic hand will fix everything magically (people might not compensate for bad decisions eternally)
    
18. Expect people to stay
19. Don't make difference between maintenance & development cost
20. Let non technical people take technical decisions
21. Ignore problems
22. Don't recognize people work in crisis
23. Allow managers to not be able to evaluate technical people
24. Consider Indian outsourcing can solve everything
25. Think people are easily replaceable
26. Don't talk about carrier evolution to your crew
    

If you are lucky, you will have to replace your team one by one but they could resign all in a short time and put your business in a major crisis situation. Don't forget, there is no free lunch.