The Art of a Cutover Plan (Part 2)

Welcome to the second part of “The Art of a Cutover Plan”.  Click here to visit Part 1

Before we start adding tasks to our cutover plan we need to finalize the structure and rules of engagement. Let’s define our task structure. We will have a rule for the things or tasks that go into our plan that we must follow. 

Start each point with “Every Task will have …”

• an actionable title and description:  


• What does that mean?  When you’re implementing the plan the person that is responsible to execute that task should be able to do something to act upon a task.  In other words the task should be actionable and not the stated outcome.  Stated outcome is potentially multiple actionable tasks whereas every task has a specific resource that will accomplish that task as well as a duration that that task will be completed within. They should not have to ask "what does this mean?"...

• a Task id:
•  Identifier that is unique and able to be referenced by other tasks for dependency definitions
• a resource:
• A particular person that will accomplish this task
• a group:
•  If you plan on being very detailed in making sure every task has a resource then you might want to include a group in case you need to contact someone within that group to help the resource out or get resource time allotted.
• a start time:
•  If the task has to start at a specific time (otherwise this is calculated depending upon it’s dependency)
• a duration:
• All tasks should have a defined duration in minutes 
• an end time:
• This should be a calculated field. We need to know what time tasks and/or milestones should be scheduled; however, they should be dependent upon the start time plus the duration of the task.
• a dependency:
• Any dependencies that impact the start time of this task should be listed and identified by the other task IDs.
• a Status:
• At any given point in the cutover process, each task should be in a specific state (Not Started, In Process, Completed)

Optional fields:

There are several optional fields that you don’t have to track, but are nice to have for reporting, or planning purposes.

1. a Task Type:
1.  Define the task type as Separator, Communication, Testing, Milestone
2. an Activity Type:
1. Let’s you group your tasks based upon multiple resources working through tasks to accomplish a shared outcome (like MDF completion required resources from multiple groups but occurs during a particular part of the cutover).  You can have a plan within a plan capability for filtering.

This will be the basic construct of your cutover plan and you can build upon it from there.  Oh and by the way, you can use the same methodology for developing any project plan.  We are showing this to see how important a cutover plan is and what a minute by minute activity looks like as well as the tools that I use to help implement that.  In the example Cutover Plan I review, I will show many other fields used for tracking purposes. If your change event is very important and you need to track tasks being ahead of schedule / behind schedule then you will need some other "calculated" fields to track that.

In the final Blog Post we will cover the management of the plan and the communications expectations.

... Click here for Part 3 ...