6.3Transition to service management

Even once a project finishes its deliverable, the project's value is not realized unless it can be safely released into production and smoothly handed off to ongoing operations and maintenance. A PM must judge whether to proceed with production transition (go/no-go) based not just on how complete development is, but on the operations side's readiness and risk as well. The judgment criteria are built starting from the impact on users and operators once the thing runs as a live service, not from the convenience of the development side.

6.3.1Production transition and the go/no-go decision

• Production transition (release) is the activity of deploying a deliverable built in a development/test environment into the production environment actual users will use. It is more than a deployment step—it is planned to include rollback procedures, an assessment of the scope of impact during the transition, and the monitoring setup after the transition.
• Go/no-go decision: the gate at which the organization formally decides whether to proceed with the planned production transition or postpone it, judged against predetermined criteria—acceptance test pass status, absence of unresolved critical defects, readiness of rollback procedures, readiness of the operations organization, and so on. Beyond technical completeness, the criteria also include the appropriateness of the transition timing (e.g., avoiding a peak business period) and the readiness of the operations handoff.