An Easy Go Live

One of the biggest events for someone who is involved in project work is a go-live. This is when the switch is flipped and lights start flashing on the new system. It is also when the old system is generally turned off and all the hard work for the past months or years come together. Early in November I had my 3rd system go-live since I started working at my current firm. I have now been had 4 projects, 3 clients, and 3 go-lives. Each on is different. However the past few have always been extra exciting as there were a lot of last minute problems, issues, or surprises to take care of. This time that didn’t happen at all. It was the smoothest go-live I have actually ever even heard about.

In my first go-live many of the interfaces were not ready and a lot of the data had not been converted properly. We were up every night until 3am and back again in the Morning at 7am working everything out. When the system did go live we all took turns manning a phone bank to help the client’s users through problems arising from the new system. This is normal but the number of defects, unresolved issues, and work-a-rounds was quite high. We kept working on them for several months after go-live to stabilize the system. In fact instead of rolling people off the project we actually brought more in for the first few months of usage.

On my second go-live things were much better. We still had a lot of unresolved issues but for most of the team we never noticed because the client kept everyone busy upgrading the new system! It was live a week before we added functionality and upgraded one of the modules to the new version. This time though we didn’t need to man a phone bank and the users were able to use all the functionality from the beginning. We did however have to spend a lot of time working on the performance of the system. So again for several months after go-live we had more not less people on the project.

Having talked to a lot of people and watched people get staffed at various phases of projects it is amazing how often stabilization requires more resources than development. My personal view is this may be because development wasn’t completed thoroughly and cost cutting had been done at the beginning causing more costs at the end of the project. But every go-live story I hear is about the hours put in, the excitement of last minute items, and so on. So it was interesting for me to go through the go-live earlier this month.

Our project certainly didn’t skimp on resources. In fact we probably had about the right number of people (we could have used more client resources and less consultants but don’t tell my partner that). But a lot of time and energy was spent not just on the development/configuration of the system but also on the data conversions and testing of the system as well. The last two items being what really drive the quality of new system. In fact there was probably 50-100% more effort put into these areas than I have scene on any other implementation. And it worked! We went live on time and with very few issues. In fact the support team that was not actively training users was somewhat bored. Within two weeks of going live the client was discussing issue that most clients don’t worry about for a year.

Because of the smoothness of the go-live and the incredibly low number of issues we were actually able to roll people off the project quite quickly and save the client a lot of money. Hopefully in the future I have more go-live experiences like this, because even though I like a little excitement, you are much more proud of a system that works so well out of the gate.