Take Over and Hand Over Dilemmas cannot be over emphasised. As an Intrapreneur, I have always believed in setting up fool proof processes – meaning people agnostic business processes. And I have also believed, an Organisation is only good to the extent People become replaceable.

However, in reality, it completely rests on the person who takes over than the one who hands over.

Many a times when someone hands over, especially the successes and good practices, he does it with a lot of empathy and emotion trusting the person and people who take over. Unfortunately, when priorities & motives are different, successful processes give away to mediocrity.

It’s also many a time, we believe it’s good to have someone internal to take over – as part of grooming. This will again completely depend on the ability of the Person taking over to adapt. This is especially when the taking over person is not able to wriggle of personal biases and prejudices. Mostly due to long association with the Same Organisation & People, and lack of adequate exposure to outside world. It’s not easy for a Good Person to become a Good Professional.

Preferential treatments, diminishing abilities to question, favouritism and ofcourse corruption and compliance issues return. It’s more so in an MNC set up, being remotely managed. It makes one wonder who influences whom and trust deficit reappears.

Wish Integrity and Ethics become the Soul of both People or Organisation. Though it sounds philosophical, looks like these qualities are becoming rearer…as many of us being witnesses to such happenings. It matters very little, whether the transition is within the Family or between professionals. It only justifies a New Leader is always a better choice – atleast for few more years.

It’s back to basics – Leaders are Born, not Made…20years should be the maximum one should be in an organisation, after which the 4Es – Excitement, Enthusiasm, Efficiency & Effectiveness Drops due to lack of ability & willingness to think differently. Focus shifts to maintaining status quo than leading & transforming. Thus a new external leader will be more helpful to build the next phase of the Organisation.

About the Author :

Dr. NITHYANANDAN DEVARAAJ (NITHIN) BE., MBA., Ph.D
President – Coimbatore Management Association
Past National Secretary – The Institute of Indian Foundrymen.
Chairman – Shri Avinashiappar Trust
Past Managing Director & CEO – Flow Link Systems (P) Ltd ( a Voith Group Company)

Dr. Nithin has about 35 + Years of Experience in Engineering Manufacturing organizations. He has worked for LMW Group, L&T, Hitachi & CRI Group. He is considered to be a Professional with a rare blend of Intrapreneurial Orientation, having been a Business Head across Engineering Manufacturing Organisations / Industries.

Dr. Nithin is an Intrapreneur with hands on experience establishing medium & large scale end to end Value Chain Manufacturing Organizations (from Castings to Finished Products) for Indian Corporates and MNCs, driving Growth & Profitability by Building, Sustaining and Growing High Performance Teams.

Dr. Nithin is a Member in Governing Council / Board Of Studies of Universities and Management Institutions as a Management Expert.

Dr. Nithin is part of various industrial associations and professional bodies; he is credited with playing a leading role in bringing land mark changes in Export Incentives, Classification of MSMEs, CPCB Norms, Waste & Disposal Management. He also plays a pivotal role in training and development of educated Youth seeking employment opportunities.

Dr. Nithin Leads a team that turned around a division and a Company, and in establishing large scale projects as bench marks in industry (This Business has won several awards at National & Regional Level which includes – Indian Foundry of the Year, Young Foundryman and Foundryman Awards, 4Star Award from CII, Green Award & Safety Award from Tamil Nadu Government & at National Level from IIF, First Indian Foundry in the segment to get OHSAS 18001 & ISO 50001 Certification and Many Kaizen awards.)

Dr. Nithin is a Managing Trustee of a Family Managed Trust involved in activities like rendering Food, Shelter, Education and Medicare. Noted for rendering services during Chennai, Kerala, Tanjore & Nilgiris Floods.

Dr. Nithin’s Academics:

• Ph.D in Management Sciences
• MBA in Finance & Marketing – Gold Medalist and University Topper
• BE Mechanical Engineer with Distinction
• An IRCA certified lead auditor and assessor for ISO 9001.
• A qualified auditor for EMS, OHSAS & EnMS
• L&T Future Leaders Training at IIM – C

Dr. Nithin’s Professional Associations:

• Member & Industry Nominee, Coimbatore Disaster Management Council
• A Guest Faculty to Premier Management Institutes & Was  Visiting Faculty to IIM – Calicut
• An examiner for Management Qualifications & Assessor for Management Teachers
• An acknowledged management trainer and consultant
• Is a regular Business Column Writer.

Dr. Nithin is a Member of:

• Foundry Development Council, Ministry of Commerce & Industries, India.
• Institution of Engineers, All India and Coimbatore Management Association
• Board of Studies in Universities & Premier Management Institutes

Dr. Nithin is Winner of:

• The Outstanding Alumni & Distinguished Alumni Awards from PSG Institutions & Bharathiar University.
• The CMA Golden Jubilee Year Best Manager award for the region.
• The Best Management Student award and many accolades at National Level.
• The Mother Teresa Award of Excellence for Young Business Managers.

Dr. Nithin’s Management Interests:

• Management of Innovation, Corporate Strategic Planning and Manufacturing Management, Green Supply Chain

Dr. Nithin can be contacted at :

Mobile : +9194879 46900

LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | E-mail | E-mail2

Also read Dr. NITHYANANDAN DEVARAAJ’s earlier articles:

The post The Travails of a Change Over appeared first on Industry4o.com.

They say failures are pillar of success. Now consider a scenario where everything in a project goes right from requirement gathering to documentation, design, implementation, testing and change management. But in the final hurdle during production deployment something goes wrong, and it fails horribly due to lack of proper planning. This kind of scenario undo whatever great job project has done earlier and makes this mistake all too glaring and visible to important stake holders. This shakes the confidence of client on project team as well. This is where a proper Project Cutover Plan comes into picture. A project cutover plan incorporates all the risk, issues and scenarios that can go wrong from past experiences and provides necessary mitigation plans and includes best practices from multiple projects.

There are numerous examples where improper planning resulted in massive failure. Let us go back to April 2018. TSB Bank, in an ambitious move, decided to upgrade its computer systems while shifting over a billion customer records. Sounds like a bold leap forward, right? Unfortunately, what was meant to be a technological triumph turned into a nightmare.

The result? A full-blown disaster of TSB’s internet and mobile banking systems. Customers were deeply impacted. Some couldn’t log in, others found their balances all wrong, and surprisingly, a few even landed up inside someone else’s account. It was chaos, the kind that shakes customer trust to the core. This incident serves as a textbook case of how critical cutover planning and risk mitigation are, especially when the stakes involve millions of end users and their financial data.

All projects generally have some kind of cutover plan depending on the type and complexity of the project. A cutover plan can vary from a new complex system implementation to something where systems are enhanced to include new features or modify existing system to fix some bugs.  So now we need to know how a cutover plan looks like and what are the factors or parameters that influences a typical project cutover plan. We can analyze this from real world IT experience of numerous transformational projects from its inception to delivery and then subsequently transitioning it to Business as Usual (BAU) or maintenance activities.

Plan Early

They key to successful cutover plan is to start thinking about it early during the inception stages of the project. Ideally there should be some kind of preliminary approach to the cutover activities documented in Solution Design document e.g. type of deployment (Rolling Update, Blue-Green, Canary etc.), type of infrastructure (Cloud / On-premises) required etc. The type of deployment approach which is required as part of cutover plan depends on the type of application to be deployed and corresponding production down time that is acceptable as part of client Business Continuity Plan. These kind of broad approaches as part of conceptual solution document often requires going through Architecture review Board approval. While the detailed cutover plan or checklist will be elaborated towards the end of a project, time needs to be allocated to what cutover plan might look like much earlier. This type of thought process will lead to cutover plan being envisioned as part of Solution Design Document during early phases of project.

Involve all the stake holders

Actual cutover planning process requires involvement of all the stake holders of project delivery team, not just the architects. Different sets of people will have different perspective towards the cutover plan. Project managers will see it from perspective of resources, who is doing what and who are on standby mode.  Testing team will see whether the functional and integration testing are approved by business users. Performance testing team will see whether the outcome of load testing results is approved   by   concerned business authority and all   NFR (non-functional requirement) are met and aligned with the customer. Security team will look at the reports for security scan of code (e.g., Veracode/Prisma/Checkmarx etc.) are clean and approved by customer’s security team. Change Managers might look at a cutover plan through the lens of who needs to be notified and trained. The cutover plan should identify specific roles for each task and, ideally, nominate secondary resources should the primary ones not be available during the cutover period.

Dress Rehearsal

 There is a saying that tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today. The dress rehearsal of an actual cutover plan addresses just that. The actual cutover plan and checklist needs to be validated so that it is exhaustive and there is no room for new surprise. This scenario reminds us of famous scene from Apollo 13 movie where the astronauts needed to figure out a way of using carbon dioxide scrubbers meant for command module to the lunar module as well. It was a typical case of square peg in a round hole. The ground control stuff sitting in Houston command and control center worked diligently to find out a solution, rehearsed each step of the solution in the control center at earth and then provided astronauts with step-by-step process once they are confident with the results from the rehearsals at their end. The dress rehearsal or mock cutover is generally carried out in pre-production environment which closely simulates production environment in terms of infrastructure and code.  The lessons learnt during dress rehearsal on pre-production environment is incorporated into production runbook and cutover plan to make it more exhaustive. We can implement some of the best practices during mock cutover in pre-prod environment itself e.g. like total code freeze, migrating / archiving data center (if applicable), involving same set of users doing both mock cutover and actual production cutover.  We don’t want people doing a cutover task for the very first time in production. One of the major objectives of mock cutover is to establish time and sequence of each of the activities documented in Production Runbook and cutover plan.

Fig 1: Schematic representation of Prod and Pre-Prod activities for a bank

Stakeholder communication & Checkpoints

 The communications plan is critical for banks for aligning stakeholder expectations with respect to project objectives and transition considerations.  The plan considers current and targeted levels of understanding of program objectives among various stakeholder groups. The frequency of communication and checkpoints depends on the complexity and duration of the cutover process, the nature of the cutover tasks, and the number of stakeholders.  Typically, high-level communications regarding the cutover will be distributed widely, while more granular communications will be tailored for project participants.

Communication plans are generally developed by the Change Managers who will work closely with Project Managers and steering committee members to define and agree with checkpoints and make stake holders aware about it. When cutover activities involve some production downtime, open and effective communication both internally and externally with business leadership and customers becomes even more important.

Fig 2: Typical Communication Plan for a bank during cut over process

 Contingency / Rollback Plan

 Imagine a team building a new bridge (the project) to replace a rickety old one (the legacy system). The cutover is like switching traffic to the new bridge, and the contingency / rollback is a plan to quickly switch back to the old bridge if something goes wrong during the switchover. The contingency plan may not be always about rollback plan, if something goes wrong during cutover process. The best way to handle when the things are not going on expected lines is to have an exception handling team ready who can help monitoring logs / queue for any issues. Assign issues (if any) to relevant SME (Subject Matter Expert). SME’s will then investigate and diagnose issues and identify solutions and then co-ordinate testing of the solution and authorize a work around, if possible. Rollback plan should be always kept as last resort to implement business continuity plan. A typical rollback plan might include several components or phases of rollback e.g., if cutover involves DB migration and archival for a bank then during Rollback first thing that we need to revert is DB migration related changes.

After a Rollback is done as part of contingency plan, testing team is involved to do one round of sanity testing before the Rollback is made available after cutover. At the end a detailed cutover plan is of no use unless it is followed diligently. A well-defined cutover plan, while crucial, is only as effective as it’s execution.  This means not just having a plan, but actively following it, including communication, issue resolution, and stakeholder engagement.

About the Authors:

Mr. Soumya Bhattacharya is a Senior Architect working in a leading Software development/ Services company with over two decades of rich experience with expertise in Banking domain. He has led complex multi-year programs across multiple industries from vision to analysis, to implementation, to application go-live, including accommodations for business and technical requirements and impact.

Mr. Soumya Bhattacharya can be contacted at :

LinkedIn

Mr. Raja Basu is a Senior Consulting professional in a leading MNC.

Mr. Raja Basu works as a business architect and helps global banking and financial markets clients to enable their digital transformation journey.

Mr. Raja Basu has special interest in responsible use of AI and sustainability.

Mr. Raja Basu is also pursuing his doctoral studies (PhD) from XLRI Jamshedpur.

Mr. Raja Basu is based out of Kolkata, India.

Mr. Raja Basu is an experienced leader in both technology and business, he has a proven track record of defining and implementing technology-driven transformations for clients in the global banking and financial markets.

Mr. Raja Basu focus lies in automation, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), and its impact on climate and sustainability (SCR).

Mr. Raja Basu possess a deep understanding of value-driven advisory practices, which have played a significant role in building strong client relationships. Throughout his career, he has actively contributed to numerous transformation programs involving complex applications for international clients across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Singapore.

Mr. Raja Basu is Bestowed with the following Licenses & Certifications :

https://www.linkedin.com/in/basuraja/details/certifications/

Mr. Raja Basu is Volunteering in the following International Associations & Institutions :

https://www.linkedin.com/in/basuraja/details/volunteering-experiences/

Mr. Raja Basu is Accorded with the following Honors & Awards :

https://www.linkedin.com/in/basuraja/details/honors/

Mr. Raja Basu can be contacted at :

E-mail | LinkedIn

Also read Mr. Raja Basu’s earlier article :

The post When Preparation Meets Production Reality appeared first on Industry4o.com.