Go or no-go: the evidence a project board should require before a Unit4 payroll cutover

The first thing the board should ask is what the pack contains, and whether anyone outside the programme can read it.

A test completion evidence pack carries the agreed strategy, the phase-by-phase execution record, the defect register with discovery and fix rates over time, the open items by severity, and a recommendation. Those rates should have reached the board as daily or weekly dashboards throughout. The pack is the last instalment of that reporting.

One test: hand the pack to someone outside the programme and ask what was tested, what was not and what is still broken. If they cannot say, the pack is not ready.

A colour asks the board to trust the programme. A quantified residual risk statement gives it a list it can minute: what was tested and passed, what was deliberately not tested and why, what remains open and at what severity, and which compensating control covers each open item and for how many live cycles.

Quantified means units the organisation recognises: employees in the untested population, pay periods the manual workaround must survive, the statutory submission affected and its due date. The programme already has the numbers. Ask for a written statement.

Two items belong on almost every list. The statutory calendar, because year-end and patch releases arrive on their own timetable and interact with a fresh configuration. The population the parallel run could not reach, as a number.

Assurance that stops at the test report leaves the riskiest hours undocumented. Payroll cutovers fail in the cutover window, not only in configuration.

The runbook covers those hours. It sits with the build plan, milestone plan and critical path documentation. It lists every task in sequence with an owner, a duration, a dependency and a checkpoint verified before the next begins. It names the point of no return, after which reverting costs more than proceeding, the rollback position before it and the recovery position after it. It says who is awake, when, and how to reach them.

The payroll-specific entries are the ones most often left out. The final legacy run and its sign-off. The balance and year-to-date transfer, reconciled. The banking file cut-off and the submission deadline, which a late programme does not move. The first live run in the new system, compared with the parallel-run result.

A decision taken by the whole room belongs to nobody.

A responsibility matrix set at the start and revisited before cutover names who is accountable, who is consulted and who is informed. A risk register carried through delivery means no open item is new at the decision point. A communications plan says who tells employees what, and when, if the first run is late. Weekly sponsor updates mean nobody first hears the position on the night.

The decision is made against exit criteria the test strategy set before execution: scripts executed, severity thresholds for open defects, reconciliation checkpoints met, runbook rehearsed. Agreed at the start, they make the go decision a twenty-minute item. Met for the first time on the night, they lose to the date.

An international organisation had payroll, absence, expenses and timesheets nobody had proved, and nothing a board could sign a go-live against.

Bear Consulting Services, as HR and payroll lead consultant, designed and ran a parallel run comparing new-system output with the legacy calculation for every pay group. A defect register with resolution rates went to the project board throughout, and a test completion evidence pack with a quantified residual risk assessment at the end.

Parallel runs proved calculation parity for over 2,500 employees and the board authorised go-live on that evidence. Read the engagement in full on the case studies page.

• The Embedded Intelligence Method. Every configuration change leaves a written baseline, a test execution record and a post-change validation: the evidence a board signs against.
• The full case study. The parallel run, the defect register and the evidence pack behind the go-live decision.
• The Unit4 X-Ray. Fixed-scope consultancy for a pack that does not answer the board’s questions.