Chapter 12. Go-live Planning

Go-live planning is not like wedding planning, it is like planning a marriage. It is not just planning for a big day; it involves planning the events prior to the go-live phase and afterwards too. A huge amount of effort has been put into the project—teams have been working extremely hard designing, developing, and testing, and a lot of communication and dollars have been put into planning the release. A well-documented go-live plan can help ensure a smooth execution of the release and make the most of all that hard work and, of course, the dollars invested in the project.

As part of the release, you may be performing hundreds of tasks, so it is important to track their progress, dependencies, and corrective actions. Go-live planning involves the following:

  • Putting together all the steps in the plan
  • Defining the sequence and dependencies between the steps
  • Determining the time needed for each step
  • Defining the owners, and ensuring that all concerned parties have a clear understanding of what is required

Multiple reviews with the IT and business teams can ensure that you have identified every task that needs to be performed as part of the cutover, and that everyone involved understands the big picture of all the tasks involved in the release and not just their piece. Using such a plan for UAT, end-to-end testing, and pilot releases can help you identify any gaps in the plan as you practice the overall release execution process. This includes the communication required across groups such as turning off certain integrations of the legacy system, the setup of a new system, data migration, data validation, release testing, or a roll back process. All the steps need to be documented in the go-live plan.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Key considerations prior to going live
  • Putting together the go-live plan
  • Execution of the plan
  • References to a few real examples

Key considerations prior to going live

ERP implementation is like a heart surgery for the organization. A readiness check needs to be done carefully, prior to going live.

There is always a tremendous amount of pressure to make the go-live date, oftentimes somebody's job(s) is on the line, and so on. However, the readiness of the organization for the new system needs to be evaluated carefully prior to flipping the on switch. The following table enlists a few important considerations and criteria to evaluate if you are ready for going live:

Area

Description

Sign off criteria

Training sign off
  • The business teams should be comfortable with the training that they've received and have access to the training documents.
  • People play a key role in your ERP success, and the end users, across all areas, need to be comfortable with using a new system and the business process changes.
  • All business leaders should have signed off on the training for their teams.
  • The IT operations team should've signed off for their training.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) sign off
  • As mentioned in the chapter, business should have verified the business scenarios, and testing should be completed using real life business scenarios.
  • Testing of all items needed to run the business including functionality, integrations, reporting, data migration, and so on should be completed.
  • All the business leaders should have signed off on the testing for their areas.
  • Document the open issues and their due dates. Review any critical issues that may be open and their impact/workarounds.

Go-live plan
  • This is a step-by-step, hour-by-hour plan that is reviewed with all the IT/business teams involved in the release, including the roll back plan and an overall timing to fit within the downtime window.
  • Release the validation scenarios and processes defined by the business/IT.
  • The plan that has been used in the previous iterations of the simulation of releases (including UAT and data validations).
  • It should've been signed off by the business and IT stakeholders.

Support plan

  • The support plan includes the support resources per area, their location and schedule, the issue communication process, (templates for providing issue description, screen shots, business impact, severity, and so on; information and tools for tracking or logging issues), Triage, and loop back with the business teams.
  • You need to ensure that there is an adequate budget approved for support (prior to going live). You don't want to be in a situation where you have to discuss dollars with the customer/business leaders while the business is impacted due to system issues. Also, you need to have a budget to not lose the resources that would be required for fixing the issues.
  • Review the support plan with all the stakeholders and users to ensure that the process for logging issues and communication is clear.
  • Set up business, IT war rooms at different locations; the handing over process between support teams can help with better communication.

Operations team readiness
  • The IT operations team needs to have enough knowledge to own support for the new system.
  • Basic items like DB backup processes and high availability/DR testing need to be in place by this time. The team should be comfortable in the monitoring of services/processes, like batch jobs and failure alerts from AOS servers.
  • The production support team needs to be up to speed in code-push procedures and additional steps like data change requests, configuration changes, and so on.
  • Security reviews and sign off (PCI compliance, SOX compliance reviews as applicable) must be completed.
  • The infrastructure setup should be based on the Infrastructure architecture and reviewed.
  • Monitoring tools (dynamics perf, trace parser, and so on) must be deployed and ready for use when needed.
  • Sign off from the IT operations team.

External sign offs and communication
  • The external sign offs as applicable for the business. For example, sign off from the bank for check/electronic payments testing, EDI customers, vendors testing, and auditors.
  • Sign offs from the respective parties.

Any exceptions need to be documented and presented to the business team and the management for making decisions. Discounting any of these areas could result in an unquiet environment post go-live and negatively impact the business.

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