Deployment planning should start post uat sign off

Deployment is considered as the critical phase of the project. They also determines the overall success of the project. The purpose of release and deployment planning is to; Define and agree release and deployment plans with customers/stakeholders. Then ensure that each release package consists of a set of related assets and service components that are compatible with each other. The ensure that integrity of a release package and its constituent components is maintained throughout the transition activities and recorded accurately in the configuration management system.

Ensure that all release and deployment packages can be tracked, installed, tested, verified, and/or uninstalled or backed out, if appropriate. Ensure that change is managed during the release and deployment activities. Record and manage deviations, risks, issues related to the new or changed service, and take necessary corrective action. Ensure that there is knowledge transfer to enable the customers and users to optimise their use of the service to support their business activities.Ensure before the deployment we  have prepared the deployment schedule and have a sign-off on availability of various stakeholders involved in the deployment. It is important that the deployment schedule is prepared while in UAT phase and not have the deployment activities. It is suggested not to have new requirements/enhancements implemented after the completion of User Acceptance testing. They can  affect the deployment schedule. 


Never do the deployments on Friday, we encourage the major deployments to be done on Monday so that we have a full week to monitor the new changes in production. During the preparation phase of the deployment few points to be considered pre-deployment are  Creating Users in production, Setting up Org wide defaults for the standard objects,Installing any 3rd party AppExchange apps, Salesforce configurations like setting default workflow user, lead owner, Case owner, enabling Chatter, Email deliverability, Salesforce to Outlook configurations, Enabling multiple currencies, configuring IP ranges for the organisation etc. Other steps include Creating and Publishing communities, Taking backup of the existing data, Ensure the code coverage is more than 75%, Prepare a checklist of all the items to be deployed, Prepare change management document, Turn off the email notifications sent automatically via workflows and so on.

 The most important process is to create the change sets with all the components involved in deployment and get the change set verified in production. If the deployment activities are well planned ahead of time, it gives the team sufficient time to verify all the components of change set before actual deployment to take place. Have to  send out a notification to all the users suggesting down time before the actual deployment. It is necessary that the users are communicated beforehand of the downtime along with the new changes/enhancements they might expect when they login post deployment.

If the change sets are already validated in production as part of preparation process, it just needs to be deployed for the actual deployment. The deployment may take few hours since all the test classes will run against the new enhancements in some complex org. Please have sufficient buffer time for the actual deployment. We would do the sanity testing in production to ensure if everything is working according to the requirement and in line with the user stories provided during the requirements. The post deployment sanity checks also helps in identifying if there was any miss during the deployment.

The users should be notified after the sanity testing so that they can start using the live environment and so on. It is must that the system should be monitored for a week before getting sign off on the deployment. There is no foolproof process to follow the deployment process. Following these steps will definitely reduce the risks assoicated with the deployment and will ensure a successful deployment. For more