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Board Checklist

20 questions before an S/4HANA go-live

What a board should be able to answer before signing off - not what the programme team's status report says, but what independent evidence supports it.

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Governance and sponsorship

  1. 1.Who owns the go/no-go decision, and have they seen the evidence rather than a status summary?
  2. 2.Has an independent party reviewed the programme, or has every report come from the team delivering it?
  3. 3.What is the decision if testing or data readiness is not met on the planned date - has that conversation already happened, or will it happen for the first time under pressure?
  4. 4.Is the steering committee seeing open defects and risks directly, or a filtered view?

Scope and business readiness

  1. 1.Has scope changed materially since the business case was approved, and has the business case been revisited?
  2. 2.Are the process owners who will run the new system signed off on it, or has sign-off come only from the programme team?
  3. 3.What happens on day one for the processes that are out of scope or deferred - is there a real interim plan?
  4. 4.Has training reached the people who will actually use the system, measured by completion, not by invitations sent?

Testing and defects

  1. 1.What percentage of critical test cases have passed, and how is "critical" defined - by the delivery team, or by the business?
  2. 2.How many severity-1 and severity-2 defects are open, and what is the plan to close them before go-live?
  3. 3.Has a full end-to-end business cycle been tested, not just individual functions in isolation?
  4. 4.Has performance and load testing happened at production-representative volume?

Data and cutover

  1. 1.Has a full data migration dress rehearsal happened, with the actual cutover runbook and timing?
  2. 2.What is the data reconciliation result - old system versus new, not just "migration completed successfully"?
  3. 3.Is there a tested rollback plan, and who has the authority to trigger it during the cutover window?
  4. 4.How many cutover activities have no named owner or no confirmed availability for the go-live weekend?

Organisational and operational readiness

  1. 1.Is the hypercare team resourced and briefed, or is it the same people who will also be exhausted from cutover?
  2. 2.What is the plan for the first month-end close on the new system, specifically?
  3. 3.Are the downstream systems and integrations that depend on this go-live actually ready, with their own owners confirming it directly?
  4. 4.If this go-live slips, what is the cost and disruption of that decision - has anyone actually quantified it, so it can be weighed against the risk of going ahead?

If more than a couple of these don't have a confident answer, that is what an Executive Transformation Triage is for - a fixed-fee, ten-working-day independent read before the decision, not after it.

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