Live

Aims of the Live phase

Core goal: maintain and support your live service

Your service is now live - you should have a support plan in place to carry out any essential maintenance. In some scenarios, you may have capacity to make improvements depending on the support arrangement.

Key work

Carry out the process for support requests

Templates (WIP)

Core team

The support team and maintenance arrangements will be agreed as part of transitioning the service live from Public Beta.

Operational requirements

Penetration and accessibility testing

You will require both a penetration test (aka IT Health Check) and accessibility test before going live. Penetration testing will need to be carried out annually after going live. We have a contract with Commissum for penetration testing and usually use DAC for accessibility testing. As we don’t have a contract with DAC you will need to get multiple quotes if it is going to cost over £5k.

Requests for change (RFCs)

Once you are live you will need to complete an RFC for every change to pre prod and prod environments. A standard change takes 10 working days from submission so it is good to get into a rhythm with these. Typically I would complete an RFC at the end of a sprint and have a deployment done at the end of the next sprint but if you are confident in your process and want faster turnaround you will need to complete an RFC for a sprint at the start of that sprint. Contact change management for help with this.

Assurance requirements

DDTS Stage Gate 5 (Operations Review and Benefits Realisation)

This gate should be passed around 6 months after transition into live.

Overview of Stage Gates
Stage Gate template with guidance for each gate