No matter what new project you’re implementing, go-live day is usually an exciting but stressful time. The good news is it doesn’t have to be! Here are four components that make a successful go-live day and can have you headed home at 5pm if you execute them correctly!

4 Components of a Successful Go-Live Day

1) People know what they need to do to do their job

There are two big pieces that will ensure that people know what needs to be done to complete their job. The first part of this is to properly train your employees. It’s important to teach them the new behaviors of an application and how it will impact their daily routine. The second part is to test their knowledge acquisition. It’s easy for people to nod their head and pretend they’re listening when you’re trying to teach them new skills. The only way to know for sure that they’re understanding what you’re saying is to test their knowledge acquisition and see that they’re retaining the information.

2) They were able to do their job

The second component of a successful go-live day is people being able to perform their job on the new system. If they were able to do their daily tasks without problems, this means that the system was properly designed, constructed, tested and deployed. The new system might not be exactly what they expected, but if they are able to navigate it and complete their tasks, it’s a success!

3) The data was right

It’s important to do your data conversions early and often. Don’t wait until your testing phase to do your conversions. It’s better to start them as early as the start of the project. It’s also important to make sure that your data is validated and wasn’t altered somehow along the way.

4) The system performed

There are two parts to ensuring that your system will perform well: proper sizing and stress testing. To get to the proper sizing, it’s important to know how many users you have, how much load you have, etc. It’s also important to stress test your load, but you should avoid doing it on your go-live date. Stress testing ahead of time will help ensure that your system is reliable and will perform well on go-live day.

Wrap-Up | More Information

If you are able to follow these steps and execute them correctly, you and your team are more likely to have a successful, less stressful go-live day. If you plan things out and go through all of these steps, you could be out the door and headed home on time on go-live day!

Check out the full presentation below for more information about these steps and how to go about implementing them.