Please find the course outline below, followed by information on module one.

Course Outline

Welcome to the dress rehearsal course.

Module One: Overview and Principles

• What are business scenario dress rehearsals?
• What are the principles of dress rehearsals?
• How do business scenario dress rehearsals differ from testing?

Module Two: Why should you do dress rehearsals?

• What are the objectives?
• What are the benefits?

Module Three: How are dress rehearsals run?

• What are the steps to run business scenario dress rehearsals?
• How many people take part?
• When do dress rehearsals start?
• How long will the business scenario dress rehearsals take?
• Where should dress rehearsals take place?
• Who should manage dress rehearsals?

Business dress rehearsal project examples

• Media Company
• Insurance Company
• Charity Organisation
• Common benefits across the example projects

Module Four: Cutover dress rehearsals

• What are cutover dress rehearsals?
• What are the principles of cutover dress rehearsals?
• How do cutover dress rehearsals differ from testing?

Module Five: Why should you do cutover dress rehearsals?

• What are the objectives of the cutover dress rehearsals?
• What are the benefits of cutover dress rehearsals?
• Module Six: How are cutover dress rehearsals run?
• What are the steps to run cutover dress rehearsals?
• Project Examples – Cutover Dress Rehearsals

Copyright Pathway IT Consultants Ltd 2025

Welcome to the dress rehearsal course

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.

We’ll discuss two types of dress rehearsals: business scenario dress rehearsals and cutover dress rehearsals.

The objective of this course is to give you:

• An understanding of business and cutover dress rehearsals and the value they bring to a project. (They aren’t another test phase.)
• The knowledge required to allow you to plan and run successful dress rehearsals.

Let’s start with business dress rehearsals, and then we’ll look at cutover dress rehearsals.

Module One: Overview and Principles

What are business scenario dress rehearsals?

In this activity, users complete core business processes in an isolated environment to provide the highest level of assurance for cutover and BAU. The business decides on the key business scenarios with advice from the project team, if required.

What are the principles of dress rehearsals? 

• Users run their critical business processes in a dedicated environment to prove readiness for go-live.
• The mindset of the dress rehearsal participants is that this is the first day of go-live.
• The business scenarios are agreed upon, and the users run them exactly as they will in BAU.
• Test scripts are not used. 
• The dress rehearsal sequence is based on business priority and level of risk. The most critical ones are completed first.
• Please note that multiple scenarios may be run in parallel.
• Super users assist the participants, and the support team is on call in case there are any issues.
• People responsible for the role after go-live should complete the activities in the dress rehearsal. They could identify system or data problems that the test phases overlooked. 
• Run at least the first week’s BAU activities and additional weeks if possible. One full month is recommended, plus any additional priority activities such as critical reports, etc.
• Dress rehearsals are not a rerun of UAT or any other test phase.
• Ideally, production data should be used for the dress rehearsals to ensure data quality and to confirm the validity of the dress rehearsals.
• Run real-life scenarios using live data wherever possible. For example, processing a full day’s worth of transactions.
• Roles and permissions are validated to ensure they will support BAU processing.
• Run integrations using the production schedules and BAU volume data to prove timing.

How do business scenario dress rehearsals differ from testing?

The key differences are:

• The users do not follow a test script. They run the core business processes exactly as they will in BAU. The users complete them using knowledge gained in training.
• There is a much higher level of user participation compared to test phases.
• The scope of dress rehearsals is much broader than testing. This activity provides assurance on cutover and readiness for go-live.
• Dress rehearsals use live data unless there are insurmountable issues.
• Data quality assurance is built into all dress rehearsal activities. 

Actions

Think about how you would include dress rehearsals in your projects.

Prepare slides to introduce dress rehearsals to your organisation. Suggested topics include:

1.    The principles of dress rehearsals.

2.     Benefits of dress rehearsals.

3.     Dress rehearsals – They are not a rerun of any test phase.

This is important. Many people assume dress rehearsals are just another test phase and question their value. Running the business processes in BAU mode always uncovers additional issues.

4.     Actions required to allow your organisation to run dress rehearsals.

Review your current ability to run dress rehearsals. Do you have an environment that would support this activity? If not, what work would be required to prepare the environment? A To Be production environment can be ideal for dress rehearsals. This also has the added benefit of proving the environment before going live.

5.     Next steps

Do you have a current or planned project that would benefit from dress rehearsals? Include information on the prerequisite actions to run business and cutover dress rehearsals.