Cutover activities & responsibilities: RACI by phase

Cutover activities are the discrete tasks that make up the cutover plan. A typical cutover has 30–60 named activities spread across the six phases of preparation, dress rehearsal, T-1 readiness, the cutover window, post-cutover validation, and hypercare.

This page applies RACI — Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed — to every activity, by phase. The goal is precision: every owner should know exactly which activities are theirs, at activity granularity, not phase granularity.

Definition

Cutover activities are the named tasks in a cutover plan, each with a single Accountable, one or more Responsible owners, and explicit Consulted and Informed lists. Applying RACI at activity granularity — not phase granularity — is what separates a runnable plan from a status document.

A brief reminder on RACI

Role	Meaning	Per activity
Responsible	Does the work	One or more
Accountable	Owns the outcome	Exactly one
Consulted	Two-way: their input is required	Zero or more
Informed	One-way: they need to know	Zero or more

Two rules that matter for cutover RACI specifically:

1. One Accountable per activity, always. Two Accountables means no Accountable.
2. Accountable can also be Responsible. The cutover lead often does both, especially on small programs.

The role legend

The tables below use five role-based leads. On small programs one person holds multiple roles. On large programs each role is a stream of 5–15 people with the stream lead at the top.

Role	Abbreviation	Scope
Cutover lead	CL	End-to-end cutover, all phases
Infrastructure lead	IL	Servers, networking, deployment, DNS
Data migration lead	DL	ETL, data movement, validation
QA lead	QL	Smoke tests, validation scripts, defect triage
Business stream lead	BL	Business validation, end-user comms, sign-off
Executive sponsor	ES	Go/no-go authority, escalation

Phase 1 — Pre-cutover preparation (T-14 to T-2)

Goal: confirm readiness, freeze the source system, eliminate scope ambiguity.

Activity	CL	IL	DL	QL	BL	ES
Finalize cutover plan	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
Source-system change freeze	A	R	C	—	I	—
Communicate window to end users	A	—	—	—	R	I
Confirm rollback environment	A	R	C	—	—	I
Confirm on-call rotation	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
(ERP) Confirm transport queue stable	A	R	C	—	I	—
(Data) Confirm source schema lock	A	C	R	—	I	—

Common mistake: leaving “Communicate to end users” without an Accountable. The cutover lead is Accountable; the business lead is Responsible for the wording.

Phase 2 — Dress rehearsal (T-7)

Goal: execute the full cutover sequence end-to-end against a production-like environment, with the actual team, at the actual time. See the dress rehearsal walkthrough for the runbook.

Activity	CL	IL	DL	QL	BL	ES
Refresh non-prod from production	A	R	C	—	—	I
Execute end-to-end cutover sequence	A	R	R	R	R	I
Time-stamp every checkpoint	A,R	C	C	C	C	—
Exercise full rollback	A	R	R	C	C	I
Capture debrief log	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
Update runbook live	A,R	C	C	C	C	—
Produce action list	A,R	C	C	C	C	I

The executive sponsor is Informed on outcome only — they are not in the war room during execution.

Phase 3 — T-1 readiness review

Goal: a deliberate go/no-go decision, in writing, before the cutover window opens.

Activity	CL	IL	DL	QL	BL	ES
Confirm all prerequisites complete	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
Verify most recent backup taken and validated	A	R	C	—	—	I
Confirm rollback environment ready	A	R	C	—	—	I
Confirm war room / Slack staffed	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
Re-confirm on-call rotation	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
Formal go/no-go decision	R	C	C	C	C	A
Record decision in runbook	A,R	I	I	I	I	C

The executive sponsor is Accountable for the go/no-go decision specifically. The cutover lead is Responsible for presenting and for execution after the decision.

Phase 4 — Cutover window (T-0)

Goal: move from source to target. Validate. Open to users.

Activity	CL	IL	DL	QL	BL	ES
Lock source system	A	R	C	—	I	I
Take final backup snapshot	A	R	C	—	—	I
Execute final data migration	A	C	R	—	I	I
Validate row counts and checksums	A	—	R	C	I	I
Run smoke tests against target	A	C	C	R	I	I
Business validation / UAT	A	—	C	C	R	I
Cut DNS / load balancer / integrations	A	R	C	—	I	I
Open target to users — go-live	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
Send go-live announcement	A	—	—	—	R	I

The Accountable for every activity in the cutover window is the cutover lead. This is intentional and non-negotiable — single accountability is what makes mid-window decisions executable.

Phase 5 — Post-cutover validation (T+0 to T+1)

Goal: confirm the new system is operating correctly under real load. Reconcile any final discrepancies.

Activity	CL	IL	DL	QL	BL	ES
Monitor real user transactions	A	C	C	R	R	I
Reconcile final data discrepancies	A	C	R	C	I	I
Confirm integrations are flowing	A	R	C	C	I	I
Confirm batch jobs and ETLs running	A	R	C	C	I	I
Triage and assign early-life issues	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
Maintain rollback option	A	R	R	C	I	I

Hypercare formally begins when this phase signs off, but rollback readiness continues through D+3.

Phase 6 — Hypercare (T+1 to T+14)

Goal: stabilize. Resolve incidents fast. Transition to standard support.

Activity	CL	IL	DL	QL	BL	ES
Stand up dedicated support channel	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
Triage and resolve incidents within SLA	A	R	R	R	R	I
Run daily hypercare stand-up	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
Maintain rollback readiness through D+3	A	R	R	C	I	I
Decommission source-system access	A	R	C	—	I	I
Run lessons-learned retrospective	A,R	C	C	C	C	I
Transition to standard support team	A,R	C	C	C	C	I

After hypercare ends, the cutover is complete and the system becomes a steady-state operation.

Activities by role: a quick reference

Read the table by the column that maps to your role. Counts include activities where you are Responsible, Accountable, or both.

Role	Activities you own (R or A)	Where you are Accountable
Cutover lead	All 6 phases — typically 35–45 activities	Almost everything operational
Infrastructure lead	Phases 1, 4, 5, 6 — typically 12–18 activities	Source-system lock, DNS cutover, infra components
Data migration lead	Phases 1, 4, 5 — typically 8–12 activities	Data migration execution, row-count validation
QA lead	Phases 2, 4, 5, 6 — typically 6–10 activities	Smoke-test execution, defect triage
Business stream lead	Phases 1, 4, 5 — typically 5–8 activities	Communications, business validation, sign-off
Executive sponsor	Phase 3 only	T-1 go/no-go decision

Common activity-RACI mistakes

Two Accountables for one activity. “Both the cutover lead and the data lead are accountable for the data migration.” That is not RACI. The cutover lead is Accountable; the data lead is Responsible. The cutover lead can also be Responsible if the program is small, but two Accountables is always ambiguity.

RACI at phase level instead of activity level. “The data lead owns Phase 4.” Phase 4 has eight activities, only one of which (data migration) is the data lead’s primary responsibility. The infra lead owns lock and cutover. The QA lead owns smoke tests. The business lead owns validation. Phase-level RACI papers over these distinctions until 03:00 of cutover night, when they become problems.

Executive sponsor in the war room. Marking the executive sponsor as Consulted for cutover-window activities means they need to be reachable during the window. That is fine. Marking them as Responsible — or having them physically present — changes how the team makes decisions. Their RACI role is narrow: Accountable for the T-1 decision; Informed on dress-rehearsal status, hypercare incidents, and the go-live announcement.

Skipping Consulted on integration activities. Activities that touch other teams’ systems (downstream integrations, batch jobs, reporting pipelines) need explicit Consulted entries for those team leads. “We’ll loop them in” is not a RACI assignment.

No Informed on user-facing communications. End-user comms have a Responsible (typically the business lead) and an Accountable (the cutover lead). They also need an Informed list: every stakeholder who needs to know when the comms went out and what they said.

When to scale the RACI

Small program (≤5 people). One person may hold three or four roles. Maintain the activity-level RACI; just put the same name in multiple columns.

Medium program (6–15 people). Each role has a clear primary owner. Most activities have one Responsible and one Accountable. RACI fits on one page per phase.

Large program (16+ people). Each role expands to a stream with its own internal RACI. The cutover-level RACI assigns stream leads. The stream-level RACI assigns individuals within the stream. Both exist; both are needed.

Generate a plan with RACI included

The cutover plan template generator produces a phased plan with activity-level RACI assigned based on your team size. The generator uses the same five-role model as this page and scales naturally between small, medium, and large programs.

Related

• What is a cutover? — definition and scope
• Cutover phases breakdown — the six phases, with each one’s goal, activities, and go/no-go gate
• Cutover vs go-live — where the go-live moment sits inside the cutover window
• Cutover rehearsal: the complete guide — how the team practices the activities before T-0
• Cutover dress rehearsal: a walkthrough — the T-7 end-to-end run of the activity sequence