The next phase in a Digital Evolution is run, and it's where your preparation and hard work come to fruition. The steps in the run phase include test, deploy, and sustain.
Here's where the rubber meets the road – you've put a solution in place and now it's time to test, deploy, and sustain it. It's weeks or months worth of work, but you can't skip critical steps in this phase; you owe it to the firstline workers to think through the details.
Stay tuned for the enhance phase.
Video transcript:
As we continue through the Digital Evolution cycle, the next phase is run. This is where the rubber meets the road because during this phase all of our preparation and hard work comes to fruition for the first time. The primary steps in the run cycle are test, deploy, and sustain.
The testing step is exactly what you'd expect. This is where the solution is tested in a variety of manners, depending on the complexity of the solution. This often includes integration testing, user testing, and in some cases automated testing when possible. When we follow the process, the testing steps should be validating that the system does what it's supposed to do from a technical and business perspective and that it's sufficiently reliable for release. Remember that quality is conformance to a requirement, not a measure of goodness. So we need to root out subjectivity to the extent possible and focus on delivering against the objectives of the initiative.
After testing we move to deployment, and like some of the other steps, this is hard to summarize in a quick few minute video because there are many components to a successful deployment. But generally these will include the logistics or the technical deployment of the software and devices necessary for the system. This step also includes the necessary communications and training to ensure all stakeholders are prepared for this launch. There are usually many more people affected by a new technology deployment than just the users and all of them need to be considered in this phase.
Last is the sustain step, which includes all of the systems, processes, and artifacts that will be necessary to maintain this system going forward. All too often, we see project teams hyper-focused on the initial deployment, but the success of the solution will be disproportionally affected by how we support those users day two and beyond.
Again, I just took what can be weeks or months of work and compressed it into a couple of minutes. It's not always easy to cover this phase well, but I've encountered too many systems over the years that weren't utilized to their fullest extent and in many cases it was caused by skipping over critical steps in this phase. We owe it to those firstline workers to think through these details because, frankly, they have other work to do and it's our job to give them the best tools we can and prepare them for success.
The next phase is enhance and I'll share those steps in my next video. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Thanks again for watching and we'll see you again next week.
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