Cutover Runbook

A cutover is one of the few genuinely high-stakes, time-boxed operations in software delivery, and it is frequently planned in a document that has never been executed.

What the runbook must contain: every step in order with its owner and expected duration; exact commands rather than descriptions; verification points after each significant step, with what "correct" looks like; decision criteria — the specific conditions under which the team proceeds, pauses or rolls back, agreed in advance rather than judged under pressure; the rollback procedure for each step, and an explicit marker of the point beyond which rollback is no longer possible; and communication points — who is told what, and when.

Rehearsal is what separates a plan from a hope. A full dress rehearsal in a production-like environment finds the missing permission, the step that takes four hours rather than forty minutes, and the dependency nobody listed. It also produces the realistic duration, which is what the outage window should be based on rather than the estimate.

Two scheduling points: choose a window where volume is low and the right people are awake, and avoid freeze periods and adjacent business-critical events — cutting over the week before peak trading is a decision that will be examined afterwards.

And staff it as an incident: a coordinator who does not execute steps, an executor, and someone recording the timeline.