The Loser at the End: Cutover software as success factor

January 3, 2020 | Michael Lex

The choice of professional cutover software is fundamental to the success of a project

In most projects a lot of energy, time and money is invested to reach the project goal as good as possible. Good time, task and resource planning is as much a part of this as accurate tracking of progress and costs. Professional software programs have been used for years to achieve this. You don't want to leave anything to chance, and you also want to fulfil your reporting duties precisely and just as efficiently at all levels of the project and the company.

Even when planning the cutover, the processes of the big bang are carefully surveyed over weeks or even months, recorded, put in relation to each other and finally combined in a schedule. Nothing should be left to chance. Who wants to fail on the home stretch or be “the loser at the end”?

Cutover software

Unfortunately, professionalism stops with the choice of the appropriate cutover software for planning and, above all, for controlling the cutover. Here, too often one relies on the MS Excel solution already available in the company. The flexibility and ease of use of the program is certainly a good argument, but its strengths at this point are also its weaknesses.

During dress rehearsals and cutovers, the number of employees involved in the control center must be increased significantly, usually due to the 24-hour shifts. The correct use of the planning sheet, which is usually “pimped” by macros and/or formulas, by the employees not previously involved in the planning, often presents a great challenge and ultimately a project risk. The re-sorting, filtering, deleting or inserting of tasks during a dress rehearsal or cutover can lead to the loss of links (dependencies of tasks) or other important information. In the worst case, the dress rehearsal/cutover must be stopped for this reason or even the fallback scenario must be executed.

Who would want to jeopardize the months of effort on the home stretch of the project? If you do not want to leave anything to chance in this project phase either, we recommend the CutoverManager. Its professional functions and database-based data management offer the necessary flexibility and security for the smooth and reliable execution of your cutover.

Changelog
April 12, 2020 – headlines revised
January 3, 2020 – publication