The culmination of any big initiative or project has a launch day. All eyes will be checking out out the new experience, including your management team. How can you ensure a successful launch?
You need a launch plan.
Similar to a launch plan for a replatform, your project launch plan have QA (quality assurance) and a thorough UAT (user acceptance testing) by both your partner and your team. You should have a detailed launch checklist, broken down by tasks, who is responsible, and timeline to execute. Right before launch, there should be a checkpoint meeting with a “go/no-go decision” to discuss who is doing what and ensure everyone is prepared to execute. If anyone is not ready, you should not launch.
Here are the best launch day recommendations:
- Make sure you have properly and thoroughly performed UAT (user acceptance testing) and thoroughly tested the site. Your partner should have a process in place for UAT, as well as a timeframe for your team to test and review the site. Take advantage of the UAT period to test the site and learn how to use it, ensuring everything performs as expected.
- Make sure your team has been trained to use the platform and knows how to do their daily activities.
- Ensure you have a hypercare period. If you launch the site at 7am, make sure your partner and your team is around to address issues. Make sure there is a plan in place to support your website for a few days post launch for any issues that may arise.
- Have a launch checklist to ensure everything on the site is tested and ready for launch. This will be used on launch day.Have a launch day call with multiple parties, including your organization, your partner, and any third parties (paid media team, SEO team, etc). Make sure that all updates are made and work as expected.
An example of a launch checklist is below:
If you are looking at partners for a replatform or to support you in large project initiatives, you can turn the above launch-day recommendations into questions to ask potential partners:
- A lot of our team will have to do promotions, emails, content, and images. How are we being trained on the new project functionality?
- Is there a launch checklist?
- Is there a day-of launch plan? What does this include? (Great examples would be checking to make sure all your links work, all your connections in your technical ecosystem map work, payment gateways are working, all your third party apps are functioning, etc.)
- Do you have “hypercare,” or 24×7 support to ensure everything is ok?
- Is there team allocation to address any issues?
With a supportive partner in place and a strong launch-day plan, you should have a smooth launch on the big day!
