4 Steps for a Smooth(er) Software Deployment
You only have to live through a bad software deployment once or twice to quickly learn that you want nothing to do with that ever again. You’ll start finding ways to prevent it from happening. If you have experienced the despair of a bad deployment, the following is a starting point for avoiding another one. There’s no guarantee that this will help things go 100% smoothly, but it will certainly make the process smoother and remove the finger-pointing at the end.
Create a Form
Sure, a form is the solution for everything that ails a project manager. But, there’s something to be said for that. You want to create a Production Release Candidate form that includes the basics about what will be deployed. It should include a brief description, the target date of deployment, what else will be deployed along with it, and room for LOTS of signatures.
Talk About It Each Week
Talk about this production release candidate at each of your weekly status or PMO meetings. Start talking about it at least a month out so that people know it’s heading their way. It may be included in the IT Project Plan, but you can’t make assumptions that people will read the plan. IT needs to know it’s coming to make sure the right hardware is in place, QA needs to know it’s coming so they can thoroughly test it, and the Documentation team needs to know it’s coming so they can prepare user guides and training manuals. There should not be one person in the company who is surprised that there is a release that will be happening in the next 3-4 weeks.
Get Approval from All Who Have a Stake in the Project
Key managers from each department should be on that Production Release Candidate form. Once the application or product is in its finished state, you should go around to each manager and get their written approval. They should not hesitate to sign the form if they feel everything is ready to go. Don’t settle for a verbal approval. Require that each person sign this piece of paper saying that they have done their due diligence in reviewing it from their department’s perspective, and feel comfortable with it being deployed. Requiring their signature will make them look at things much more closely, and remove their ability to point fingers at other departments later.
Who are these key managers? At a minimum you should have Engineering, QA, Client Support (Call Center), Marketing, and Training/Documentation. It will be different for every company, but the principle is that you want to make sure that everyone has had a chance to say their peace, and that they feel comfortable with the deployment moving forward.
Get Approval from One Last Person
You should have room on the bottom of the form for the one person these different departmental managers roll up to (depending upon the size of the company). It may be a VP, COO, or President of the company. This informs them what is going on and lets them know that the entire management staff feels comfortable with what is about to be deployed.
You are now in a much more comfortable position to release the product or application into a production environment. You’ve accounted for approvals and sign-offs in the IT Project Plan and everyone’s signature is literally on the same page. There’s no guarantee that everything will go 100% right, but you can be assured that things will go much smoother with this high degree of scrutiny.
