The Deployment Plan describes the factors necessary for a smooth deployment and transition to ongoing operations. It encompasses the processes of preparing, installing, training, stabilizing, and transferring the solution to operations. For some projects, deployment can be very complex. For these types of projects it pays to start deployment planning as early as possible to manage the risk of delays due to deployment difficulties.

Here is a list of some things to consider for your deployment plan (this is not necessarily the complete list of considerations; your project may have more):

• Scope
  • Stakeholders (those affected by the solution)
  • New and changed Business Processes
  • Licensing considerations
  • Approx. # components per platform
• Deployment strategy & schedule (e.g. phased, site-by-site, push vs. pull, dept. by dept, etc)
• Organizational Change Management
• Implications of new and old system and processes in production at the same time
• Deployment Resources
• Help Desk Preparation
• Desktops/Servers Affected
• End User Training (High level business process and detail usage)
• Installation Process
• Installation Validation
• Support during Stabilization
• Hand-off to Support and Operations
• Activation of Monitoring (for computer systems and business processes)