Cutover planning: data quality and working time regulation

April 12, 2020 | Michael Lex

Useful functions that save a lot of time and thus distinguish a professional cutover software

Basically, a planning tool for a cutover focuses on the actual planning of the cutover and the error-free and timely control of the tasks. Nevertheless, criteria that are often underestimated, especially at the beginning, are often decisive in creating an error-free and coordinated planning.

The most frequently underestimated criteria are the validation of the data quality of a cutover plan and the working time regulation of all resources involved in the dress rehearsals and the actual cutover.

Validation of data quality

The cutover plan is usually developed gradually and over a period of months. Ongoing additions or changes due to new findings and additional tasks that have to be integrated into the existing plan. This can quickly lead to circular references of tasks, duplicated tasks or tasks without responsibilities etc.

The CutoverManager as professional cutover software offers the function to check a cutover plan for its data quality. This useful function not only saves a lot of time when validating plans loaded from another medium (e.g. Microsoft Excel), but also provides continuous support for a plan created successively with the CutoverManager.

When validating the data quality, the following checks are performed:

Circular references of tasks
Duplicate tasks
Tasks without an assignment of responsible resources
Resources in parallel tasks, i.e. resource conflicts
Tasks with a relative start to the predecessor, but without a predecessor
Tasks (no milestones) without duration
Tasks with a duration greater than 24 hours

In our view, the most important checks are the validation of the circular references of tasks and the identification of resource conflicts. These planning errors carry a high risk of cutover. Due to their complexity, both checks can only be carried out in an automated and computer-aided manner. Many other planning tools reveal their weaknesses here.

With the help of the data quality function in the CutoverManager, the current planning status can be validated again and again, without any additional effort, and in case of errors can be corrected directly from the overview of problem cases.

Working time regulation

Many tasks at the cutover and in the preceding dress rehearsals usually take place on weekends in 24x7 mode, i.e. HR, the works council and also the trade office must be informed in advance and their approval must be obtained. In addition, the statutory working time regulations, which prescribe maximum working hours and minimum rest periods between the individual shifts, also apply at these times.

It is usually very complicated and time-consuming to derive the exact times of deployment of individual resources from the current planning and to prepare them for coordination with the relevant committees. In addition, it is usually difficult to tell from the task planning whether the legal work regulations are being observed throughout.

The CutoverManager supports the collection of the resource usage by creating a matrix of tasks and resources in a freely definable time period, accurate to the hour. From this an HR/works council report can be derived quickly and efficiently.

In addition, the employees are listed for whom, according to the plan, there would be a working time overrun (with freely definable maximum working times). If an employee has gaps between his or her tasks that are (or should be) regarded as rest periods, these gaps are also listed for the respective employee. In this way, you can also validate whether the legally required rest periods between the individual tasks or shifts are adhered to.

These evaluations are created in seconds in the CutoverManager. With other planning tools, corresponding information can only be determined with a high manual and time-consuming effort.

The CutoverManager offers some useful and time-saving features to efficiently support the cutover team with their core tasks as well as with marginal topics.