The Art of a Cutover Plan (Part 1)

Welcome to the first part of “The Art of a Cutover Plan”

The purpose of this blog post is to walk through the creation and the process that you go through in order to create a cutover plan.  The goal is to create a well-thought-out process that will allow you to organize your thoughts when thinking of what needs to be covered in the case of a major change event that an organization might be facing.  With that being said, I decided to break this blog post up into three sections.  The first section covers the strategy and the “why” as it relates to the need of a cutover plan, the structure of the plan, and method that we will use to fill out the plan.  The second section is about the creation of the plan, using the structure and the methodology mentioned above. Finally, the third blog entry will be about the implementation of the plan, the ways you intend to communicate it, how it will be managed and what the expectations of the cut-over weekend from the Stakeholders perspective will be.  So let's get into the methodology or as I like to refer to it the philosophy!

Now, I know that talking about a cut over plan as a philosophy sounds a little bit out there; however,  when you think about it, it’s really a good driving force to define the “why” when you are doing  this cutover or change event.  If you understand the “why” you have some guidelines to follow to make sure this is a non-impactful change event.  That, after all, is the reason we do planning, to diminish the amount of risks that we take when implementing changes. No matter what your Change event, a change event plan should be a required Deliverable.  For Migrations, It most certainly is, as well as being repeatable depending upon the number of applications involved.

 So let’s look at our first phase of the cutover plan.  We need to create a structure in this first phase as the structure is going to be the building block that will help drive to completion of the cutover plan.  Just think of a cutover plan like a story.  You will have a beginning, middle and an end.  There will also be some key building blocks that we define that are used throughout our plan to support it, while it is being developed.  Those building blocks are referred to as cutover milestones.  Now the second building blocks are in areas of planning that define specific timeframes.  Milestones will help delineate between those  phases, as well as, within those phases.  The important part of the phases is they are easily communicated and well defined periods of the cut-over process.  So what I mean by that is, we are going to define specific terms that coordinate with my beginning, middle and end.  For the purposes of my cutover plan, I will refer to them as "Pre-Cutover", "During Cutover", and "Post Cutover".

We have defined our base structure for the plan and we have defined some building blocks that we’re going to use as reference points in order to build the plan.  Anything added to the plan, will have to drop into a particular phase either before or after a defined milestones.  That brings me to the different types of milestones. 

In my summary blog post I mentioned that there are milestones specific to a date and time.  A hard deadline if you will.  With that, milestones have hard deadlines that will occur within a specific time and other activities will either happen before or after that milestone.  The second type of milestone can be tied to an activity completion. That means a task or several tasks have been completed and will represent a milestone within the activities on the cutover weekend.  Now this milestone is not specific to a time or a hard deadline, but it is dependent upon certain tasks to be completed.  Once this milestone is achieved usually there’s some sort of the communication that occurs after it.  Sometimes that milestone is the completion of the testing of the tasks that create a milestone moment.

So in completing the structure of our cutover plan we have defined the following:

1. We have a purpose and understanding of the reason why we’re doing this change and what the impacts are if it is not done properly.
    
2. We understand the phases that we will be working with (beginning, middle and end).
3. We understand the clearly defined separators (milestones) that we will be tracking with and documenting to.

This completes the structure of our cutover plan and how to start it.  In the next blog I will walk through the process of creating the cutover plan using this structure.  We’ll talk about adding tasks understanding what questions to ask in order to fulfill the milestones that we provided.  So before we end, Start to define your plan by understanding what your beginning, middle and End.  These can also be referred to as phases.  Identify what the milestones are that separate those phases as well as any specific milestones that you can think of that will live within those phases.  We will start to build our Tasks that look like:

Next Blog entry:  The Art of a Cutover Plan (Part 2) Click to visit

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