Andrea Jones walks through the final phase of ERP implementation: the cutover plan that maps data migration, passwords, and server resets, a go/no-go decision meeting, then hypercare. Hypercare is 2 to 4 weeks of intensive support, sometimes stretching to three months, where users get a departmental champion and ticketing help until the system stabilizes.
Questions this video answers
2–4 weeks
4–6 weeks
About three months ("the fourth trimester").
Chapters
Hi, I'm Andrea Jones and today we're going to talk about the last major step in an ERP implementation and that is the cutover, go live and hypercare step. So an analogy I like to use for cutover is how many of you ever were in a show or a production theater performance, or maybe you had some sort of event that you were hosting or you were working with the team, putting the event on. Have you ever done a run of show, you know, where it's like at 7:01 we put the speaker out, at 7:02 we cue the curtains, I mean, whatever it might be. I was helping with a, an alumni conference last year and I was the emcee for the event. And so I was the person in charge of putting together the run of show. And that was like very detailed. Quite frankly, I'm not a tenacity person in the working genius, so it was a bit of a stretch for me. But we did it because we needed to know, like what time are we going to call everyone into the main room? What time are we actually going to get started with the overview presentation? What time is the first speaker going to come up? We had to get them up there and make sure they had all of the materials that they needed and the microphones were working and all of those things. So that's a run of show. A cutover plan is kind of like a run over show, a run of show because you are getting every single little step written out in order. Who's going to do it in the right sequence, what time or when it's going to be done in order to go live with your new system. That's the cutover plan. And there's lots of things that go into that. There's of course the final data migration into the system, there's making sure all the passwords are set, maybe you have to reset the entire server, you have to do whatever you're doing in the cloud. And all of the people who come into the office need to be logging into the new system. They need to have a new link sent to them perhaps, or a new place that they're going, specifically a new system that they're opening or website they're going to, whatever it might be. I mean, all of these things, they seem so ticky, tacky and detailed. But they're very important to make sure that this system goes live and goes well. Before we go live, we like to have a go, no go meeting with all of the subject matter experts and champions and people representing the end users to Say, hey, are we ready to go? You know, is this go or a no go? And if it's a no go, why not? Hopefully at this point it's always a go. But you know, because we've been working with these people for a while. But it's nice to have that formality looking at the cutover plan, that run of show, and going live as per the plan that gets us into hypercare. And the term hypercare is, you know, like hyperactive, like extra attention, extra care. And we think it takes between four and six weeks. Really it's a full three months. I like to say it's kind of like the fourth trimester. If you've ever had kids, you know, just because you're all ready to have that baby, you bring it home, him or her home. And nothing can really prepare you for what it's like to have your very first kid at home. Right? You're waking up in the middle of the night, are they still breathing? Oh my goodness. It's very similar. It takes about three months. But really the most focused hypercare is, let's say two to four weeks. You're seeing the most critical issues coming up and get resolved a couple more weeks until it's sort of steady state and a full three months till people feel pretty comfortable in that time. It's very important to be very attentive to your end users. Some issues are not critical. They might just be slight misunderstandings. Some of them are bugs that weren't found or at the volume that you're at, or some something works as it was planned. But maybe we didn't expect that because it's not the process we used before and we didn't fully internalize that it was going to go in a different way. So that's the hypercare period. And employees need to feel like they have someone they can talk to or a ticketing system or some way of bringing up their concerns. And I prefer they all have one human being that they know they can go to, one champion, whether it's their supervisor or the dedicated champion for their department or their area with any questions or concerns. So that's, you know, that's a lot of people, if you think about it, for a big organization, like there's this many employees and there's this many champions and this many of their managers kind of comes up to the top that all of that is considered part of your hypercare plan. So getting ready for go live, it's the cutover plan, that run of show, go, no go. And you actually do it and you execute the cutover plan and that's when you're going live. And then hypercare to make sure that everybody is feeling good, confident, and able to be productive with their jobs in the new system. Thanks for watching.
