Preparing for Technical Go-Live

At least a month before go-live, all of the technical tasks related to updating the system earmarked for production need to be addressed. The most critical of these tasks addresses the issue of change control; any change that must be implemented into production needs to be communicated to the CDM and advanced down the change management path now. You want to ensure that each change has ample time to settle in and prove itself within your SAP system landscape. And, just as importantly, you need time should one of the changes lead to an unstable SAP technology stack; backing out a change, or researching new changes and updating the stack, takes time.

As outlined in the Accelerated SAP (ASAP) methodology, you’ll also need to focus on last-minute production support, which is another way of saying that last-minute issues need to be managed and resolved, and the results of live business processes need to be validated. ASAP never allotted much time for these activities, however; in our experience, nothing less than a calendar month makes sense.