Laddawn.com : Go Live Planning

1-Communications & training

• "What's in it for me?" Generate buzz and enthusiasm about improvements
• "Uh oh - what's different?" Change management - identify major deviations from current practices and manage the transition to new practices proactively, if a change has some negative consequences - how do we deal with it? If the change is for the better, but it's just hard to accept change, steer it back to "what's in it for me?"
  
  • Internal audiences - each has unique needs and perspectives, impact on each will be different
    
    • CE, CR, shipping, production, other?
    • CE, CR - hands-on users need at least a month of exposure to fully functioning system - formal training? Resources? Precede this with gradual introduction to key, new concepts - meetings, presentations, posters depicting user flows in the garage, etc.
  • External audiences
    
    • Frequent users
    • Infrequent users?
    • New customers?

2-Technical preparations & considerations

• Data migration/conversion
• Backout plans - if something major goes wrong, how do we revert to old system?
• Other?

3-Quality assurance and testing criteria

• How do we decide we're ready to launch?
• What can we learn from LOAP?

4-What can go wrong during and after launch, and how will we prepare ourselves to handle such eventualities?

• Obviously, we don't know what we don't know - we should not try to predict or guess every thing that could possibly go wrong. Rather, we should identify a few plausible, generic scenarios and some contingency plans.