Communication is a crucial part of go-live planning. The following is one of the references I would like to provide on why communication is so important when avoiding turning smaller issues into bigger challenges:
- In one of the upgrades, we had a very small downtime window to perform the upgrade. It was shortened further as updates in the data warehouse were going to take time, and we had to keep aside some time for roll back as well. However, with multiple iterations (thanks to the great technical team that was on the project) we were able to squeeze time to meet our requirements. Most of the core technical team was up the whole night to perform the upgrade and went to bed after the hand over to the team in the morning. It was almost bug free until the users showed up at the warehouse and started shipping. The requested delivery date printed on the shipping labels was the same day, the warehouse couldn't start shipping.
- Multiple e-mails, phone calls were received with messages like 'Warehouse can't ship.'', ''Warehouse is down.'', ''Need to call FedEx for delayed pickup.'', ''Should we stop picking?'', and so on. This noise went on for two hours. It was hard to get a clear understanding of the real issue, until we reduced the audience and got on to call.
- In AX 2009, Microsoft added multiple dates on the sales orders that is, estimated ship date, requested shipping date, confirmed ship date, and so on. One of these custom date fields to be printed on the shipping label was mapped incorrectly to the default value (that is, the system date). This date was the delivery date given to the Japan post which, obviously, couldn't be the same date. It was just one line of code change for the developer once the real issue was explained.
- Out of the many learnings from this experience, I would say that managing communication after the go-live is most critical.
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