The following activities should be addressed as a part of planning for deployment:

• Availability of Deployment Team and other resources to carry out the deployment
• Availability of dedicated internal and external resources
• Requirements for training and skills
• Planning for cut-off and outage in order to push in the new release, including Number of Service outages required taking into consideration the business cycle
• Sending out communication with respect to service outages
• Identifying issues and risks with respect to deployment
• Anticipated impacts on the organizational structure, environment for the new or changed services, direct customers and users, partners, suppliers etc.
• Roles and responsibilities for the deployment activities.

The Deployment Team’s readiness to receive and implement the Release Package should be assessed. The Release Manager supervises the overall deployment of the Release Package. The Release Manager along with the Deployment Team must create a schedule for deploying the Release Package into production. The deployment schedule is a step by step timetable detailing all the events involved in the deployment or roll-out of the release, including roles, responsibilities and site-specific considerations, risk planning, outage planning, etc.

Meetings should be held with key stakeholders involved in the rollout to walkthrough the schedule and amend if necessary. Roll out may be scheduled along with some weekend batch programs / scripts with an intention to least affect the normal user operations.