Go-Live

So I have now gone through my first go-live. This is as major of an event as can really occur in this line of work; it is essentially the main event. All of the months of work, configuration, and testing lead up to “flipping the switch” and turning on the system. The old system is shut down and users now finally get to see all the work that has been done. On top of that this is also the time when things are going to go right or when things are going to crash and burn. Because of these things this is one of if not the most stressful time in the project. No two go-lives are the same and none goes 100% smoothly. Especially, in this day and age when all projects are on a shortened time frame and crunched budgets.

So I have been on my current project since last July. I was originally brought on to help with integration testing. Integration testing is not really that technical it is trying to use the new system to test a new process end to end. An example of this is running an expense report from importing the credit card data through to cutting a check to the employee. This type of testing validates the configuration, should include any custom code, it also tests integration between modules for the first time, and verifies that the system can actually handle the business process. The key to successful testing is coming up with as many scenarios as possible that are likely to happen and to quickly resolve issues and move on. Normally on an SAP project there are 3-5 cycles of testing. Each cycle becomes more complicated.

At this client we had 503 test scripts (the step by step instructions for a sub-process), 221 test scenarios (the different ways processes may need to be handled), and 1477 test cases (the actual test it self). So there was a lot of testing. In fact we tested from August until mid December before we started cut over activities. I personally think testing is the most stressful time for most people because it is when all the bugs are found in the system and there is the most work to be done. Later, at go live it is more stressful for the consultants and managers because it is their necks on the line.

Cut-over activities are pretty routine build the production environment, run the conversions, switch on the interfaces, and finally start using the system. However these are extremely important and when they have problems or issues they are what make going live hard. In this case we didn’t really have a lot issues beyond some table updates (no big deal) and some conversion problems. However the conversion problems caused more that 30,000 records to need to be changed in the new production system before going live.

This issue resulted in a week of sleepless nights for your’s truly. I actually ended up writing several scripts to automate these changes. Many times we had as many as 8 different PCs running automated scripts to update the information. One night I was on site until 3 am and back at 7:30 am the next day. By the end of the week I was burnt out. I thought I was done, and then 10 min before I left I found out I had another 3-5 hours of work to do. Because go live was scheduled for Monday I couldn’t do much about it. I stayed an extra day worked that night, then took the first flight in the morning. It was certainly a new experience that I assume will have to be repeated in the future!

Post go-live I had just as much fun making similar changes. Thought the system was live and working over the next weeks we continued to fix issues with POs. The problem was actually that the business never cleansed there data and we brought in all open POs for the last 15 years. In the old system these just sat there and did nothing. In SAP they have financial impact and are very visible because they created new liabilities. I also had the fun of manning the Help Desk for a while. I thought after four years of college and working with a prestigious firm would shield me from such duties. Nope. The client had failed to staff it properly and I had extra bandwidth. Next time I need to make sure I am on a team with more important post go-live activities to avoid doing more than one or two shifts. All in all my first go-live was very interesting, a lot of hard work, but I don’t think it was as bad as many people have made out.