Deployment or Transition Planning is critical to the success of your project and needs to start at the beginning. You may have succeeded in building a great solution but if it is not deployed correctly or adopted by the users it may not be seen as a successful project by the Executive Sponsors.
Include transition as part of your requirements gathering remembering to keep the end in sight. Look for any area that may be affected with the deployment as these areas may not be represented on the core project team. Such as existing processes, processes or governance policies that will need to be updated and approved prior to deployment or a group of users that have to be trained prior. If items like these are missed, it could jeopardize the project schedule and budget.
Your Communication Plan should include many audiences. Include people that are not directly impacted by the deployment but may need to know about it. Most formal communications need to be reviewed and approved by management so ensure that you know this timeline requirement well in advance.
Training will be needed by whomever is providing different levels of support. Make sure to include that in your Training Strategy. This training may be different than what is being developed for users, such as including processes for how to track issues and escalation at deployment and the weeks following. Also include time for support providers to be adequately trained as scheduling resources working on a Help Desk can sometimes be challenging.
The Transition Plan establishes the framework for the detailed transition plans in each area. It identifies the overall schedule, assumptions and constraints, key personnel and roles, and risks and contingency, against which plans will be built. Reviewing the plan with all participants of the deployment well in advance to see if there are any items that have been missed or dependencies as well as terms of acceptance will help to ensure that you are successful.
The detailed transition plans will include a step-by-step map of what needs to happen and when, plus the contingency plan and the time at which either has to execute or fallback and related communications. Remember to plan for a spike when you launch and depending on the amount of training and communications prior to launch, complexity, etc. will depend on how long it will last.