Planning a system cutover weekend: what goes in the runbook
A go-live weekend is won or lost in the six weeks before it. Here is how I structure the runbook, the rehearsals and the go/no-go decision.
Most of the go-live weekends I’ve run were uneventful. That wasn’t luck. It came from a runbook rehearsed until it was boring, and a go/no-go decision that people trusted.
Write a runbook with an owner and a check on every line
The programme plan says what happens and roughly when. A runbook goes further. It says who does exactly what, in which order, and how we know it worked. Every line should have:
- a task ID and a short, unambiguous description
- a named owner (a person, not a team) and a named backup
- a planned start time and duration
- the tasks it depends on
- a check that proves it is done, such as a record count, a test login or a screenshot
If a task can’t be written that precisely, it isn’t ready to go in.
Rehearse it at least twice
The first dress rehearsal finds the missing steps. The second tells you how long things really take. Data migration timings in particular are almost always longer than the supplier’s estimate, so time every load and extract against production-sized data.
After each rehearsal, update the runbook and re-baseline the timeline. If the critical path no longer fits inside the downtime window, find out now rather than at 3am on Sunday.
Agree the go/no-go criteria in advance
By the time of the go/no-go meeting, everyone should have signed off the criteria weeks earlier. The meeting checks them. I group them into five areas:
| Area | Typical criterion |
|---|---|
| Technical | All environments built, interfaces tested end to end |
| Data | Migration reconciled within agreed tolerances |
| People | Training completion above the agreed threshold |
| Support | Hypercare rota staffed, escalation routes published |
| Safety | Clinical safety case signed off, hazards with mitigations |
Each criterion gets a named owner who reports red, amber or green on the day.
Write the rollback plan as carefully as the go-live plan
Decide the point of no return and what triggers a rollback before you reach it. A rollback that has never been tested isn’t a plan. At minimum, walk it through as a tabletop exercise with the people who would carry it out.
Plan support for the first Monday after go-live
The weekend is the easy part. Monday morning, when the first clinics open and the phones start, is when reception desks, clinics and back-office teams find what the testing missed. Floor walkers, a visible command centre, a single number to call and a daily issues review for the first fortnight will do more for the system’s reputation than anything that happened over the weekend.
A cutover runbook template is on the resources page.