Go-live cutover and hypercare

Go-live readiness, the cutover plan, final validation, the first days in production and the hand-over to support.

In this lesson

Readiness checklist
Cutover runbook and production validation
Hypercare and transition to support

Key points

Readiness: UAT, training, data, rights, integrations, mail, backups, rota, rollback
Hour-by-hour cutover runbook, rehearsed on staging
Validate each critical flow in production, then reverse test data
Hypercare: daily stand-ups, monitoring, escalation with evidence, formal hand-over

Real-world example

On a Monday go-live, invoices failed to email. The hypercare checklist had 'outgoing mail server configured in production' ticked, but the SMTP password was the staging one. Because log monitoring was on the hypercare rota, the consultant saw the authentication errors within 20 minutes, fixed the server and re-sent the queue before customers noticed.

Questions and answers

Name three things to monitor in hypercare.

Logs/errors, scheduled actions, email queue, performance (also integration logs).

What ends hypercare?

A formal transition to support and a lessons-learned review.

Read the full lesson, worked example and quiz