A senior stakeholder for a client of mine has a knack of planning (and executing) common-sense deployment ideas. This client was about to deploy a major system upgrade across England and we included plans for three sites to act as pilot sites.
Our senior stakeholder insisted that representatives from every other site be invited to visit one of the pilot sites to satisfy themselves that the new upgrade was correctly working prior to full rollout. In order to minimise travel, these three pilot sites were geographically dispersed across England.
In addition, one large, one medium and one small site were chosen to check a range of capacity and performance profiles. Although these profiles were modelled in testing, the pilot sites offered a useful way of validating these models and checking for deviations from them.
Lastly, the plan specified that the deployment could not proceed until the senior representatives had given the go-ahead that the system was fit for the operational environment. This approach provided additional reassurance beyond that of the acceptance test activities.
The result was empowered, satisfied stakeholders followed by a successful deployment.
