Deciding how and when to deploy

How and when to roll out your new implementation, or update your implementation, depends on the scale of the change. The obvious answer is as soon as testing and pre-go-live training is complete. This may be the case if your new implementation or updates impact a single set of stakeholders, for example, a single sales division. If your implementation impacts a large number of users or involves multiple teams or locations, you might want to consider rolling out access in phases. The benefit of enabling the functionality or access for a small number of users first is that any issues can be identified and resolved with a limited impact on users. Once in a live environment, any issues that were either not identified in testing or are the result of the deployment can have an impact on live data, which will need to be corrected. This is easier to do if it impacts a limited dataset.

If you are considering a phased approach, the first point to determine is...