As any pilot will tell you, flying a plane is easy, it’s the take-off and landing that is the difficult part. Moving code to production is similar to being an air traffic controller. All airplanes must land at the same airport and in a controlled matter. There are many different planes that have different speeds and landing capabilities, so the air traffic controller must be able to keep the traffic flowing to production while keeping the planes from crashing into each other. In code deployments where systems are being implemented for large ERP solutions with multiple integrated systems, we utilize the concept of “Task Release” to control the streams of work. Multiple tasks from different work streams are gathered and consolidated into one plan. The tasks are then aligned into the proper sequence with a duration and resource. During a mock cutover or production deployment, the tasks are released to the resources that will respond when complete. the completion of a task will trigger the release of successor tasks. In order to gather the individual tasks in the plan, we break the solution into two major parts: Technical Cutover and Business Deployment. The technical cutover consists of the technical and functional team’s steps. The business deployment consists of steps that the business users need to accomplish during the deployment. Each part is then integrated into one plan.
In my next post – I’ll dig into a bit more on tools we utilize to communicate the release of the task and the project status in real time by integrating MS Project, MS Outlook and MS Excel.