Dress rehearsals do more than any other activity to prepare the organisation for go-live. They can be included in any project and provide the highest level of cutover assurance. 

Business scenarios and cutover dress rehearsals are included in the course.

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. She may spot issues with the system or data that have been missed in the test phases. 
• Run at least the first week’s BAU activities and additional weeks if possible. (One full month is recommended.)       
• Plus 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. 

Why should you do dress rehearsals?

What are the objectives?

• Prove holistically (end-to-end) the technical solution, business processes, integrations, security configuration, data quality and readiness to go-live.
• Data quality assurance of the end-to-end data flows with production data. This requirement is critical for scenarios that can only be tested with the correct volume of live data.
• Replicate the first days, weeks, months or quarters of BAU before going live.
• For some projects there may be a requirement to include future activities in the dress rehearsal. An example would be year-end processing six months after going live.

In this course you will also learn the benefits of dress rehearsals and best practice when managing them.