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Go-live Checklist

Step-by-step checklist to execute before, during, and after a production deployment.


T-5 business days (preparation)

  • Change ticket opened in ServiceNow with full description and rollback plan
  • Maintenance window confirmed and communicated to stakeholders
  • Staging environment validated — all acceptance criteria met
  • Runbook reviewed and signed off by ops team
  • Monitoring and alerts configured in production
  • On-call engineer confirmed and briefed

T-1 day (final checks)

  • Production environment pre-conditions verified (access, dependencies, configs)
  • Deployment artifacts ready (container image, release tag created)
  • Communication sent to affected users about the upcoming change
  • Rollback artifacts prepared (previous version tagged and accessible)
  • War room / Teams bridge link ready in case of incident

Go-live day (execution)

  • Confirm maintenance window is active
  • Execute deploy per runbook procedure
  • Smoke test key flows immediately after deploy
  • Monitor dashboards and alerts for 30 minutes post-deploy
  • Business owner confirms expected behavior in production

Post go-live (stabilization — first 48h)

  • Monitoring shows no unexpected errors or performance degradation
  • All configured alerts are firing correctly (no false positives/negatives)
  • System documentation updated with any production-specific details
  • Runbook updated with any lessons learned during go-live
  • Change ticket closed in ServiceNow
  • Release notes published (see Releases)
  • Stakeholder communication sent confirming successful go-live

Warning

If something goes wrong:

  1. Do not panic — follow the rollback plan in the runbook
  2. Open a P1/P2 incident in ServiceNow
  3. Join the Teams bridge and notify the on-call engineer
  4. See Incident Management