Software Rollout Plan and Deployment Checklists - Overview
The usual Risk
- In general: The last one gets bitten by the dogs.
- In IT-Projects: The deployment manager is the last one in the IT project chain to hand over the "hot potato" to IT Operations
Everything not done during the development phase needs to be done during deployment.
Our Recommendation
To avoid this unwanted scenario
- Deployment related Requirements need to be specified and agreed in the very early requirements phase and derived activities need to be clearly assigned.
- Deployment planning should start long time before deployment activities will start
The starting point
A recommended early starting point is to read at the very start of the project our high-level Rollout Plan and Deployment Checklist and get for all check items which you consider "not the deployment manager's topic" (written) evidence who will take care about those.
Whereas the high-level Deployment Checklist (10 pages) just lists 101 items,
More detailed - for larger organizations
the following detailed templates and checklist provide detailed information for certain topics within the deployment process:
- The Template Non-Functional Requirements contains many requirements which are direct or indirect important for the deployment.
- When deploying a highly integrated IT system in larger organizations the Outage Planning on its own is already a challenging task! Our 27-page supports you in this task.
- Project managers not specialized on deployment got heavily sweating when realizing the day before going live that backup is required
and got surprised that the the backup team responded to their emails asking for daily backup
of the new server with a long request form to be filled and purchase orders for backup agent software for the new server.
To avoid this situation we recommend that you read at least the "Table of Contents" of our Template for an
- Although Data Migration is usually an own sub-project, the final execution during the night of "going live" is part of the deployment. The last chapter of our will provide you valuable information.
- Too often the documentation created by software developers does not satisfy the Operations Manager who needs an Operations Manual. Our is a valuable and time saving help for creating this important deliverable.
- If you have to deploy an upgrade or migration project, then our
- IT Application Upgrade / Migration Checklist and
- IT Server Upgrade / Migration Checklist are of great value for you.
- If the topics Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery suddenly pop up as important topic during deployment, then you
definitely should read our to ensure that you select the technology you NEED. Those few Euros or Dollars for our decision template might save you huge money!
- It will definitely help you to realize that
- the costs for the additional man days for deploying DR technology is huge
- and you even need to plan man days from the software vendor although DR technology is purchased from an infrastructure vendor,
- and you should never burn all the DR-budget for the hardware.
- If retiring the old, replaced application is required, then our will help to avoid that you fall into the same traps like others before.
Deployment Checklist