Go-Live with confidence

‘Are we ready to Go-Live?’ is a board level question where the answer has only increased in complexity. With the amount of investment that organisations are putting into technology, it is no wonder that senior management and boards need far greater assurances before approvals are given.

In order to stay in pace with the market, organisations must deliver existing products and services and provide new products and services that are enabled through technology and digital channels. A quick time to market and meeting customer expectations is critical to maintain the competitive edge. In this highly competitive environment, failing to achieve a successful Go-Live may result in revenue dilution, customer dissatisfaction and reputational damage. Therefore, a timely, successful and secure Go-Live of the new products and services is the ultimate ambition of all organisations.

Going live with a new solution and service is a complex and high-risk undertaking, requiring people, processes and technology to work in complete cohesion to ensure the business and technical readiness. We have continuously witnessed that the prospective solution fails to offer all the promised functionality in a user friendly and resilient manner.

The launch of a new solution is an inherently risky and confusing time and cyber criminals are known to have taken advantage of this confusion to target vulnerable customers. We have also seen that newly launched systems buckle under the user demand, resulting in poor customer experience and revenue dilution.

So how do governance committees and Boards get themselves comfortable that they are aware of the risks and the associated impacts in order to support these strategic decisions?

An Independent Programme Assessment (IPA) can help to assure that the Go-Live exercise is a well planned and appropriately resourced exercise. This is critically important because only an objective and comprehensive assessment can provide confidence that all the functional and non-functional requirements have been satisfied before the decision to migrate is taken. An IPA will identify risk areas in a prioritised manner and work with the business to ensure that the Go-Live risk remains within the appetite and fully understood by the management.

An IPA provides a holistic evaluation of the entire Go-Live glidepath (see below) to identify what needs fixing and design mitigations:

• Parallel Run Assessment: Assess whether the functionalities or processes running concurrently in the legacy and new system provide comfort as to data integrity and functional coverage
• Business readiness: Evaluation of whether the business is ready to receive the solution in terms of target operating model, training and cultural alignment
• Technical readiness: Testing that the applications and infrastructure are ready for the business as usual operations, in a secure, resilient and serviceable manner
• Cutover governance: Assessment of the cutover design to build a strong plan and go/no go criteria to ensure that service continuity is confirmed and compliance with the regulatory requirements is ensured
• Go-live/Business Readiness Review: Undertaken to assess programme readiness to implement solution and readiness of business capability
• Post Implementation Review: Undertaken to evaluate how effectively the programme was run, whether the objectives have been met and ensure benefits are realised

An IPA is the critical friend throughout the project life cycle and especially through the Go-Live process to ensure that it is on the right track to achieve the desired time to market and drive the expected value from the transformation.

KPMG have a proven and effective approach to reviewing Go-Live, leveraging the Global Enterprise Transformation Tool (GETT) to drive pace and confidence, and help avoid the pitfalls that others have made before.

KPMG has market leading expertise in programme assessment and a depth of expertise across the industry that provide an informative perspective on transformation issues faced by organisations.

• Review expertise: KPMG is recognised as a market leader for reviewing large-scale transformation programmes – our credentials attest to the quality of our work, deep expertise and flexible approach
• Sector knowledge: KPMG pair this functional expertise with deep sector knowledge across industries, including: financial services, energy, government, manufacturing and technology

The true value of Independent Programme Assessment (IPA) lies in its ability to drive positive change. Building trust is crucial to driving positive change and delivering value from agile transformation.

In the dynamic business environment, where adaptability and responsiveness are paramount, having an objective evaluation of your transformation programme helps you to stay on course toward achieving their strategic objectives. An IPA can help an organisation to navigate the complexities of agile transformation with confidence, fostering a culture of trust, continuous improvement and innovation.