Don’t celebrate go-live too early!

?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c00b3876vHE

Go-live is extremely important and emotional event into any enterprise applications implementation. Its’ a coronation to few months of project team relentless efforts to meet implementation timelines and enable the organization to reap the benefits of the implementation

When it comes to the cloud, most of technology vendors ambitions is to enable their customers to go-live in few weeks, considering that cloud reduces several weeks required to acquire the hardware and provision the environment

Definitely, the faster go-lives guarantee higher ROI and enable business to benefit from the huge R&D vendors spend on innovation. Nonetheless, premature go-live is extremely risky to the organizations and can be associated with major interruption to the business

Risks of Premature applications-go live

 Many risks are associated with the premature go-live, some of those are listed below

1-   Interruption to business operations

Premature go-lives might introduce major interruptions to business operations that will increase business process cycle times, impact customer experience, delay books closing and management reporting generation

2-   Impact on users’ adoption and change management

Premature go-lives will negatively impact users’ adoption to the new application and will make change management efforts more costly and complex. It also opens the door the change resistors to spread rumors about system health and benefits

3-   Increase audit complexity and costs

Premature go-lives will increase audit complexity and costs and will shake the confidence into accuracy and compliance of financials and management reporting

4-   Negative impact on enterprise reputation

While healthy speedy go-live will have positive impact on organization reputation and brand value, premature go-live and business interruption will have completely the opposite impact  

Go-live Strategy  

Go-live strategy is a key component into project management plan and should be decided at early project phases and should be validated regularly to assess fitness with the project and organization status. This is an integral part to the project management plan document that addresses other strategies including but not limited to

?      Data Migration Strategy

?      Training Strategy

?      Testing Strategy

?      Integration Strategy

?      Communication & Change Management Strategy   

What are the factors that impact go-live strategy?

 Go-live strategy is dependent on several factors including but not limited to:

-      Project scope and complexity

-      Project Phasing Approach

-      Testing strategy

-      Training strategy

-      User's literacy & adoption

-      Executive management sponsorship

-      Integration with echo systems

-      Legal and compliance considerations

Key considerations in different go-live Approaches

 Below table compares two approaches for the go-live addressing when, pros and cons for each approach

Key Considerations before your go-live

 Below are some key considerations you need to review before your go live

?      Assure that latest technical patches are applied on your production environment

?      Assure latest fixes have been applied before Go-Live

?      Assure Production and Non-Production are in sync … if you face a production issues, your technical and support team should be able to reproduce it

?      Assure that your environment sizing is adequate to accommodate your production operations. Stress testing or environment resizing assessment is recommended

?      Assure that you have a clean bill of health from final project review

?      Consider business-critical activities (period/year-end, statutory reporting or tax cycles) aren’t conflicting with your planed go-live date

?      Ensure that communications and training completed for all users and stakeholders

?      Ensure that Onsite/on-call assistance available during critical cutover activities

?      Ensure proper helpdesk procedures are documented and communicated across the users’ community

Finally, this article wasn’t meant to increase reluctancy to go-live or encourage the delay of the go-live plan, but to encourage a careful review to the go-live plan and highlight the importance of deciding the go-live strategy at the early project phases