The Million-Dollar Question: Are You Actually Ready to Go Live?

What a major technology go-live really looks like, and a practical guide to preparing the Run Sheet and Go-Live Readiness Report that get you there, with a free template to get you started.

Today is the BIG day. We’re going live with a new system that directly delivers $1.4 billion of savings for New Zealand business, every year.

Exciting? Absolutely.

A little nerve-racking? Yep, for sure.

As I write this, I’ve got one eye on our Go-Live Run Sheet and another on our Microsoft Teams chat. The team is well rehearsed, everyone knows their part and everything is progressing as planned.

Today's cutover will take around six hours and involves 55 separate business and technical actions. Which probably gives you some idea of why I’m not a big fan of describing go-live as “flicking the switch”. Because that’s not really what happens.

A successful go-live is about carefully moving a business from one operating environment to another, without dropping anything along the way. And if you have a major technology project heading towards go-live, there are two things I think are particularly important to get right:

1. A Go-Live Run Sheet that controls exactly how you’ll make the transition.

2. A Go-Live Readiness Report that demonstrates you’re actually ready to do it.

Here’s how we’ve approached both.

https://youtu.be/kYOXKh6e5c8

First, what does go-live actually look like?

For this project, today's cutover starts with progressively stopping activity in the old system.

We shut down integrations and take the final database backup. We then migrate the data from the old system into the new one. Once that's complete, integrations can be switched across, data reconciled and the new environment tested. Only then can we confirm that users can log in and actually do their jobs.

That process has been broken down into 55 actions. Every action has an owner, a specific time slot and a defined place in the sequence. That might sound like a glorified checklist.

It isn't.

Your Go-Live Run Sheet is your control mechanism

A good Go-Live Run Sheet should tell everyone involved exactly what needs to happen, when it needs to happen, who is responsible and what happens next.

At a minimum, I want to be able to see:

• The sequence of cutover activities

• The planned start and finish time

• Who owns each action

• Dependencies between activities

• What needs to be checked or validated

• Whether each activity has actually been completed

• Key decision points during the cutover

• Any issues that arise and how they affect subsequent activities

• The point at which rollback may need to be considered

But simply writing the Run Sheet isn't enough. You need to rehearse it.

Go-Live rehursals have been the most valuable part of preparing for our go-live. Rehearsals helped us test the sequence, timing, responsibilities, dependencies and hand-offs between different people and organisations.

A plan can look fantastic on paper, but the rehearsal is where you discover whether it'll actually work. And that's exactly the sort of discovery you want to make before go-live day.

A great Run Sheet doesn't mean you're ready

Your Run Sheet tells you how you're going to go live, but it doesn't tell you whether you should. That's where a Go-Live Readiness Report comes in.

Today's six-hour cutover has actually been 22 months in the making. The project started with an idea to reduce business risk and expand the functionality of an existing system so it could better serve the people who operate it and the customers who rely on it.

Since then, we’ve understood the problem, worked out the right approach and built the business case. We’ve defined requirements, selected technology and partners, designed and built the solution, migrated data and connected everything together.

Then we tested it. Fixed things. Tested it again. And all the way through, we've been preparing the people and the business for the change. Eventually all that work leads to one deceptively simple question: Are you actually ready to go live?

Don't rely on gut feel. Define “ready”

When your system directly delivers $1.4 billion of savings every year, “we think we're ready” isn't a particularly reassuring answer to take to your executives or Board. You need to be able to demonstrate it - define what “ready” means before you reach go-live, agreeing the criteria and gathering the evidence that supports your assessment.

This is an anonymised excerpt from our go-live readiness report:

Overall Readiness Summary 

Area	Status	Current Position
People Readiness	🟢 Green	Core training and operational preparation substantially complete. Day 1 coverage confirmed.
Process Readiness	🟢 Green	UAT, business process validation, cutover rehearsals, and rollback planning completed.
Technology Readiness	🟢 Green	Environments, integrations, data migration/reconciliation and cutover rehearsal completed.
Security Architecture Review	🟢 Green – actions remaining	Finding 1, Finding 2 Finding 3, Finding 5 and Finding 12 complete.
Certification & Accreditation	🟢 Green	C&A complete. Memo recommends Go-Live with n-months certification.
Overall	🟠 Amber	Operationally ready for Go-Live with remaining commercial actions requiring acceptance.

For this project, I've structured our Go-Live Readiness Report around three fundamental areas: People. Process. Technology. There are other readiness facots outside of the core system which I have also included for the board to assess.

It's a simple framework, but I've found it gives you a really useful way of looking beyond whether the system itself works. Lets break it down.

1. People: Are the people ready?

Your system can work perfectly and you can still have a difficult go-live if your people aren't ready.

People Readiness checks

#	Readiness Criterion	Status	Description	Current Position
1	Client Organisation, Delivery Partner trained and competent	🟢 Green	Ensure personnel required to operate and support New Platform have appropriate knowledge and training.	Client Organisation and Delivery Partner training is complete.
2	User testing and training completed	🟢 Green	Ensure users are prepared to interact with the new platform and associated processes.	Users do not interact directly with New Platform until Go-Live Part 2. Integration Partner A and Integration Partner B training is complete prior to Part 1, with Client Organisation webinar/show-and-tell sessions planned before Part 2.
3	Client Organisation operational readiness confirmed	🟢 Green	Confirm Client Organisation is operationally prepared to transition to New Platform.	UAT and operational validation are complete. Production reconciliation and smoke testing are incorporated into the Go-Live sequence.
4	Support and hypercare resourcing confirmed	🟢 Green	Appropriate resources are available through cutover and early production support.	Delivery Partner, integrators and Independent Project Partner are scheduled for Go-Live and support. Formalisation of the ongoing Delivery Partner support arrangements remains linked to Managed Services Agreement.

So don't just ask whether training has been completed.

Ask:

• Do people understand what's changing?

• Have the right users been trained?

• Are the right people available during cutover?

• Does everyone involved understand their role?

• Do operational teams know what happens from day one?

• Is the right support available when the system meets the real world?

Think beyond your end users too. Your support teams, vendors, administrators and everyone involved in the cutover itself may all have a role to play.

2. Process: Can the business actually operate?

The next area is Process. Have you proven that the critical business processes work from end to end?

Process Readiness 

#	Readiness Criterion	Status	Description	Current Position
5	UAT completed and signed off with no P1/P2 defects	🟢 Green	Confirm New Platform satisfies agreed business requirements without unresolved P1/P2 defects.	Complete. All P1/P2 defects were resolved and successfully retested, with the agreed UAT exit criteria achieved.
6	Business processes validated and ready	🟢 Green	Validate the core business processes required to operate New Platform.	Core workflows have been validated. User-facing preparation continues ahead of Go-Live Part 2.
7	Communications, templates and user-facing links updated	🟢 Green	Ensure users and stakeholders receive the information required for Go-Live.	Communications have been drafted and are ready for execution.
8	Rollback plan validated and pre-production environment ready	🟢 Green	Ensure an agreed recovery path is available if production cutover cannot be successfully completed.	Complete. Rollback planning has been completed and validated through the cutover rehearsal process and incorporated into the Go-Live runsheet.
9	Runsheet and Go-Live sequence rehearsed and signed off	🟢 Green	Validate the cutover sequence, dependencies, responsibilities and hand-offs.	Complete. Cutover rehearsals have been completed using the New Platform Go-Live Runsheet, including operational hand-offs and rollback planning.

Has User Acceptance Testing been completed?

Have critical issues been resolved and retested?

Are the necessary operational processes in place?

Are communications ready?

Do you know exactly how you'll transition from the old system to the new one?

And, coming back to that Run Sheet; have you rehearsed the transition?

This is where the Run Sheet and Readiness Report start to come together.

The Readiness Report might tell you that your cutover preparations are complete. The Run Sheet and rehearsals provide some of the evidence behind that assessment.

3. Technology: Are the systems ready?

Finally, there's the technology.

Technology Readiness 

#	Readiness Criterion	Status	Description	Current Position
10	Cloud environments provisioned and configured	🟢 Green	Ensure New Platform environments are provisioned and technically ready for production use.	Provisioning and configuration are complete. Security assurance and remediation are reported separately through the Security Architecture Review and C&A.
11	All integrations validated in TEST	🟢 Green	Validate interfaces between New Platform and dependent internal and external systems.	Complete. External Regulatory System, Business System, API's, email and document-generation integrations have been validated.
12	Data migration and reconciliation successful	🟢 Green	Confirm migrated data is complete and accurate through reconciliation of key data sets and business records.	Complete. Reconciliation testing covered the key migrated data areas. No failed tests or tests requiring review were recorded. Some tests passed with documented exceptions. Final production reconciliation remains incorporated into the cutover runsheet.
13	Dress rehearsal completed with no unresolved blockers	🟢 Green	Demonstrate that the cutover and recovery processes can be successfully executed before production deployment.	Complete. Cutover rehearsals, Go-Live sequencing and rollback planning have been completed with no unresolved rehearsal blockers identified.

You need to know:

• Is the production environment ready?

• Are the integrations working?

• Has the data migration been tested?

• Has the migrated data been reconciled?

• Has appropriate security assurance been completed?

• Are critical issues resolved?

• What technical risks remain?

• Is the new environment ready to take over from the old one?

  
  

Notice that the the answers to these questions are not perfect?

Ready doesn't necessarily mean perfect

The reality of a major technology project is that you may reach go-live with some things still outstanding. That doesn't automatically mean you shouldn't proceed. What matters is whether you know what's outstanding and understand what it means. For each material outstanding item, you should be able to answer:

• What's outstanding?

• What's the risk?

• What are we doing about it?

• Who owns the action?

• Who is accepting the residual risk?

That gives your decision-makers a much more honest picture of readiness than simply trying to turn everything on a dashboard green.

Every “yes” needs evidence

This is perhaps my biggest takeaway from preparing a Go-Live Readiness Report.

Every “yes” needs evidence behind it.

• Have users been trained? Yes. Prove it.

• Has User Acceptance Testing been completed? Yes. Show me the outcome.

• Is the production environment ready? Yes. What's the evidence?

• Has cutover been rehearsed? Yes. What did you learn and what changed as a result?

That's really the difference between a readiness checklist and a readiness assessment.

A checklist can give you lots of green ticks. An assessment should give the people making the decision confidence that those green ticks mean something. It moves the conversation from: “We think we're ready” to: “We know where we stand, we understand the risks, and we have the evidence to support the decision to go live.”

The Run Sheet and Readiness Report do two different jobs

If you're preparing for your own major go-live, this is the distinction I'd leave you with. Your Go-Live Readiness Report helps you answer: "Should we go live?" Your Go-Live Run Sheet helps you answer: "How are we going to do it safely and in control?"

You need both. the report gives your project sponsors, executives and Board confidence that the organisation is sufficiently ready to proceed. The runsheet gives the people actually executing the cutover a common plan for getting from the old world to the new one.

Neither needs to be unnecessarily complicated, but both need to be thought through, evidence-based and prepared well in advance of the big day. By the time you get to go-live, you don't want to be figuring these things out.

For us, that's what today is about.

Twenty-two months of work.

A six-hour cutover.

Fifty-five carefully sequenced actions.

And one pretty important question: Are we actually ready?

Fortunately, we didn't wait until today to answer that.

Free Go-Live Readiness Report Template

If you've got a major technology project approaching go-live, I've put together a free Go-Live Readiness Report template based on the People, Process and Technology approach.

It's designed to give you a starting point for defining what “ready” means, assessing your project against those criteria, capturing the evidence and risks, and giving your sponsors, executives or Board a clear view of whether you're ready to proceed.

Send me an email to getstarted@propartner.co.nz and I'll send you a copy.