The decision to go live is very dependent on the quality of end-to-end testing and user/organizational readiness, as mentioned earlier. The following are some experiences that I would like share in this area:
Once, I was in room full of executives, making the decision about pulling the trigger on a new system. Everyone was under pressure from the CEO to say, ''We are ready''. However, most of them were not ready. They did not have enough time to go through the testing due to a lack of staff, but everyone said, ''yes''. (There was a fear of getting fired; this was way back in 2009 when the economy wasn't doing well). I failed to push back as well. Any guess as to what happened next? The customer went live, and it was very painful to stabilize them. But, lesson learnt!
A similar situation occurred again, a couple of years later. Of course, I was smarter this time. The CIO called for a meeting to check the readiness on the project. Everyone said they were ready (the CIO...