Client notes
Evidence from recent planning floors
Comments from engineering and operations leads who worked with us on readiness, placement, runbooks, or dependency mapping.
The readiness assessment caught a shared overnight export we had forgotten existed. We delayed wave one by three weeks — annoying then, correct in hindsight.
Placement planning forced us to keep two chatty services together instead of splitting them across a VPN. Latency budgets made the argument concrete.
The cutover runbook was blunt and useful. One mild complaint: we needed an extra rehearsal day we had not scheduled, which stretched the calendar.
Dependency mapping surfaced firewall rules owned by a contractor who had left. Without that pass, our first wave would have stalled at DNS.
Extended note: delaying wave one on purpose
A regional logistics team arrived with a fixed weekend already announced to partners. During the readiness assessment we found a shared overnight export owned by a contractor who had left six months earlier. Rather than force the window, leadership delayed wave one by three weeks, rebuilt the export ownership, and ran a second tabletop.
The delay was unpopular with the original calendar. The subsequent cutover completed with a documented rollback that was never needed — a quieter success than a heroic weekend recovery.