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- Introduction
- Definition of Production Acceptance
- The Benefits of a Production Acceptance Process
- Implementing a Production Acceptance Process
- Full Deployment of a New Application
- Distinguishing New Applications from New Versions of Existing Applications
- Distinguishing Production Acceptance from Change Management
- Case Study: Assessing the Production Acceptance Process at Seven Diverse Companies
- Summary
- Test Your Understanding
- Suggested Further Readings
This chapter is from the book
Definition of Production Acceptance
The primary objective of systems management is to provide a consistently stable and responsive operating environment. A secondary goal is to ensure that the production systems themselves run in a stable and responsive manner. The function of systems management that addresses this challenge is production acceptance.
The following key words from this definition are worth noting.
- Consistent methodology. While the methodology is consistent, it is not necessarily identical across all platforms. This means there are essential steps of the process that need to be done for every production deployment, and then there are other steps that can be added, omitted, or modified depending on the type of platform selected for production use.
- Deploying into a production environment. This implies that the process is not complete until all users are fully up and running on the new system. For large applications, this could involve thousands of users phased in over several months.
- Application system. This refers to any group of software programs necessary for conducting a company's business—the end-users of which are primarily, but not necessarily, in departments outside of IT. This excludes software still in development, as well as software used as tools for IT support groups.