Cutover management in times of Corona

October 18, 2020 | Michael Lex

Decentralized cutover planning is an important success factor in order to effective execute your cutover/go-live even in challenging times.

decentralized planning
cutover control
cutover software
CutoverManager

Times are challenging, the way of communication with colleagues and business partners has changed. Many companies have been following a strict line for months in order to contain the spread of Corona in the respective company. In each case, only a part of their workforce is allowed to return to work. The rest of the workforce is encouraged to work remotely from their home office.

For daily business and project work, the processes and communication channels as well as the meeting culture have been adapted over the past few months. But what about the planning, coordination, communication and control of a cutover event?

Decentralized planning

Cutover planning is still mostly done centrally by a small team in a central file (often MS Excel). The cutover manager collects the information from the parties involved, captures it in the tool and then coordinates it via video conference in separate meetings with the respective teams/specialist departments. In the event of queries or change requests, these must be addressed to the cutover manager via the planning team or, even more centrally, via one person, since usually only he or his team has access to the cutover plan.

How convenient would it be if the plan could be viewed or maintained by all participants — according to the roles & rights assigned to them? The individual teams could validate and adjust their respective planning sections independently. Time-consuming, regular coordination meetings would be unnecessary. Ideally, all changes would be logged in the planning tool, so that in case of unintended effects, such as a large time shift of milestones, the maintenance actions could be tracked and questioned by the respective persons.

Once the plan has reached a certain level of maturity, an integrated rights and roles concept would make it possible to easily and efficiently restrict adjusting activities to the cutover team. In this way, the cutover team could retain central control of the planning at all times, but decentralize the maintenance activities for certain phases, thus reducing the effort required.

It would also be helpful to be able to place tasks or milestones under special observation. These are usually special milestones, such as a go-/no-go decision or the opening of the systems to users and/or customers after the successful completion of the cutover. If these milestones are shifted drastically, it can usually be assumed that runtimes (duration) or linkages have been entered incorrectly, and a coordination and correction must be brought about as quickly as possible.

Cutover control

Even the control of a cutover in 24-hour mode by several small locally based teams can become a challenge if the corona rules are observed. Usually one person has access to the planning file and coordinates the control tasks with the other team members.

Wouldn't it be helpful if all team members had equal access to the planning tool and could control tasks separately, possibly clustered by systems, locations, topics, etc.? Or you could even leave the active control of the cutover (temporarily) to the tool and would only have to intervene actively if the schedule is not met?

Of course, all actions would have to be centrally and promptly visible and comprehensible for all participants. And the security and integrity of the planning data should not be at risk at any time, despite parallel processing.

Wouldn't it be optimal if all parties involved, such as the cutover team, management and the actively involved employees, could independently view all the required information from the planning tool at any time — without having to consult the cutover team and thus disturb the control of the cutover? Examples of this are:

Overview of the overall plan
Current execution status by comparing the target and actual times
Own tasks with individual filters and sorting
Future operating times and any shifts in the schedule

Cutover software

The CutoverManager as professional cutover software offers you these functions and much more already in its standard scope of services. Particularly to be highlighted are the functions that perfectly support decentralized planning:

Merging of plans: Small teams/departments can plan tasks and set dependencies decentralize in their own plan. These plans are then merged into a master plan.
Traceability of changes: Every change to a task is logged and can be compared to the respective previous version.
Data quality check: If several parties/colleagues maintain/edit a plan, errors can creep in. With the checking option, errors, such as forgotten responsible persons or no duration, can be found and corrected quickly.
Role concept: Each employee may only make changes to the plan according to his or her role.
Internationalization: The CutoverManager is available in German and English. It also supports time zones and individual time and date displays.

The easy installation and thus quick deployment in your cutover/go-live project completes the overall package.

If you are interested in more information, please visit our product page, get an online impression of the look&feel and the scope of services of CutoverManager. You are also welcome to contact us directly if you have specific questions. We are looking forward to meeting you.