Post Go Live: Consolidation and Review

Once the system has gone live, there will be a temptation to relax and take the focus off the implementation project. This is understandable given the effort required for the implementation. However, a consolidation and review phase will often give real benefits.

During this phase, each area should be reviewed in turn, including assessing the fit to the business, and identifying any improvements that may be necessary. These could highlight requirements for additional changes to reports, training, security access, administrative and business procedures, data set-up routines, etc. In addition, it is important to carry out a formal review of the success of the project against the original objectives stated in the project definition report.

All changes or enhancement requests should be proposed, estimated and prioritised through the Change Control procedures described in the pervious section.

As was mentioned in the Database Management section of this infoKit, there are costly overheads associated with managing and maintaining a large number of database instances and it is unlikely that any institution will require all of these instances at all times. Therefore, the institution should consider de-commissioning some of the instances once the system has settled down.

The result of the consolidation and review phase will be the efficient tuning of the implementation to give the best benefits for the organisation's business.