Tools

Cutover Control Center

A large migration has hundreds of moving parts, and the plan usually lives in a spreadsheet. Fair enough — that is where plans get written, argued over and pasted around. What a spreadsheet cannot do is answer, at three in the morning, what is running right now, what is late, and who is waiting for whom.

So the plan can start anywhere. Build it here and drop an export on top later, or import first and add the rest by hand — it is a simple interface on top of a simple database, and that alone takes a surprising amount of friction out of a cutover weekend.

What it does

• Start with an empty screen. One button makes the first activity and opens it; after that you type a name, press Enter, and keep going. Quick entry inherits the filters you are looking through, so narrow to one system and one stream and what you type lands there. Duplicate gives the next one its starting point — the run-book and the criteria come along, the status, the actual times, the blocking and the comments do not. Delete says what depends on the activity before it goes.
• Or drop the spreadsheet in. Excel, CSV or a Google Sheet: map the columns once, and add as many as you like — a master document, a run-book, one system's own view. What you built by hand collects under a source called Built in the tool and filters, groups and merges exactly like an imported one, so the order is free in both directions. Nothing is merged or linked automatically unless the identifiers matched exactly; where they did not, it proposes a relationship and waits for you to confirm or reject it.
• The questions a spreadsheet cannot answer. Running now, starting soon, late, blocked, critical at risk — as counts you can press, on one screen, against a clock. A blocked line says who it is waiting for rather than that it is red.
• Several ways into the same plan. A timeline, a dependency graph, the run-book, the teams, and an execution view built for the night itself: bigger type, fewer things, the next milestone and how far off it is.

The prototype

Loaded with an example cutover — 444 activities from three files, and a clock you can move.

Open the clickable prototype →It is an application. A big screen suits it.

Where it is

A working prototype with a bundled example plan, and no server behind it — everything you do stays in the browser. If you run cutovers and want to try it against a real plan,write to me.