Overview

 Dress rehearsals reduce risk substantially, and they do more than any other activity to prepare the organisation for go-live. They can be included in any project, work with all methodologies, and provide a high level of cutover assurance.

On this course you’ll learn about business scenario dress rehearsals and cutover dress rehearsals.

This course is designed to help business stakeholders and IT teams understand:

• What business and cutover dress rehearsals are, and the value they bring to a project.
• The principles and key activities of dress rehearsals.
• Dress rehearsal roles and responsibilities.
• Dress rehearsal principles and benefits.
• The limitations of paper-based exercises.

This course covers the key principles of dress rehearsals and is delivered by an instructor that has managed dress rehearsals for leading charities and companies in the insurance and media sectors.

Course objectives

The course aims to help you learn how to:

• Mitigate project risk with dress rehearsals.
• Plan and run successful dress rehearsals.
• Have the highest level of assurance for the start of BAU.
• Explain the value of dress rehearsals to your team and stakeholders.
• Configure and manage the dress rehearsal environment.
• Validate critical business processes, including timings.
• Prove holistically (end-to-end) the technical solution, business processes, integrations, security configuration, data quality and readiness to go live.
• Lower the level of resistance to change and achieve higher system acceptance before cutover.  
• Improve the level of support from the superusers and the support teams.

Who is this course for?

This course is designed for business and IT stakeholders, cutover managers and project/programme managers.

It will be valuable for PMO teams, IT directors, managers, support teams, quality assurance managers, test teams, data managers, security teams, or anyone involved in IT projects.  

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course you should:

• Be able to plan and manage dress rehearsals.
• Have the knowledge to manage the preparation of the dress rehearsal environment.
• Be able to explain the benefits of using the To Be environment for dress rehearsals if this applies to your project.
• Understand the dress rehearsal prerequisites and what activities can proceed if they are not all completed.
• Have the knowledge to allow you to use dress rehearsals to minimise risk. An example would be if you have an issue completing the standard test phases on a project with a non-negotiable cutover date.
• Be able to explain the effort required to run dress rehearsals. (The effort per person is usually far lower than people expect. The most successful dress rehearsals have a high level of user participation.)
• Understand who should manage dress rehearsals.
• Be able to communicate the role of quality assurance, including data quality. in dress rehearsals.
• Be able to explain the benefits of dress rehearsals to your team and stakeholders.