Yes, I said it out loud. And no, I don’t regret a damn thing.
In the glamorous world of corporate IT, we’ve built a religion around documentation.
Every new ERP rollout, CRM upgrade, or Windows migration is accompanied by a sacred text — the Test Plan.
A thick, beautifully formatted PDF that no one, absolutely no one, ever reads.
It’s blessed by Legal, approved by ten managers, signed off by the Compliance Team, and then quietly sacrificed to the almighty SharePoint.
Its only real purpose?
To exist — so when something goes wrong, we can point at it and say,
“See? It’s in the document.”
🧠 The Cult of Fake Control
Let’s be honest.
When was the last time a Head of Sales opened a 70-page test plan to “understand how it impacts operations”?
Exactly.
These things live in a parallel universe — where time is infinite, risks are hypothetical, and everyone pretends to care.
Meanwhile, the people who’ll actually use the system are still wondering when the bloody thing will go live.
That’s why I stopped writing audit test plans and started writing implementation plans for humans.
🪦 Why Traditional Test Plans Deserve a Quiet Funeral
They speak fluent nonsense.
“Regression testing,” “unit verification,” “acceptance criteria”… Brilliant words, zero meaning for anyone outside IT.
Your warehouse manager just wants to know if the printers will still print labels on Monday.
They ignore business reality.
Sure, all modules are listed. But does it tell you how to keep “order-to-cash” or “hire-to-payroll” running when things blow up? Nope.
They age like milk.
Change a date by a week and suddenly the entire thing needs ten new approvals, three signatures, and a blood sacrifice.
They tell you nothing useful.
Can the CEO glance at it and know if the system’s ready? Of course not — it’s written in PowerPoint hieroglyphs.
Classic test plans are the illusion of control.
Real control lives in inboxes, group chats, and panic meetings at 9 PM on Friday.
⚙️ The Upgrade: From Fossil to Dashboard
Now every project has one living artefact — a Deployment Dashboard.
Not a document, not a PDF, but a single screen everyone actually uses.
From the CIO down to the guy rebooting the servers — it speaks the same language: “what’s happening and should we panic?”
🎯 What’s in it
Business goal — loud and clear.
Not “Windows 11 rollout”, but “reduce workstation downtime by 30%”.
Not “CRM module deployment”, but “cut sales cycle by 15%”.
Suddenly IT sounds like it belongs at the grown-ups’ table.
⚠️ Real risks, not nerdy ones.
Not “driver incompatibility”.
“20% of accounting printers may die — month-end closure at risk.”
Next to it: who owns it and what’s being done.
📦 Scope per department.
Finance — closing periods, payments.
Production — output tracking.
IT — 1500 workstations, 50 servers, one engineer crying in the corner.
🗓️ Roadmap for real people.
No Gantt chart purgatory.
Just milestones everyone understands:
-
By 15 Nov — pilot in marketing.
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By 30 Nov — testing in Finance and Sales.
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By 10 Dec — sign-off.
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15 Dec — go live (and hopefully survive).
👥 Roles and responsibility (RACI).
Who says GO/NO GO.
Who signs the release.
Who gets the midnight call when it all catches fire.
📊 Real-time status.
Testing progress, open incidents, department readiness — all colour-coded.
Green means fine, yellow means pray, red means chaos.
✅ Go-live criteria.
Critical bugs fixed, rollback tested, support team caffeinated and on standby.
🔗 Click for depth.
Want details? Click “Risks” → full matrix.
Click “Testing” → jump into Jira.
No clutter, no nonsense.
🎯 Why It Works
For execs — it’s the single source of truth.
One look, and they know where things stand and who’s to blame.
For users — it finally makes sense. They can see what’s being tested and why it matters.
For IT — it kills 90% of the “what’s going on?” messages.
And that alone deserves a national holiday.
And guess what — people actually use it.
They open it in meetings.
They reference it in emails.
When something goes wrong — everyone checks the risk tab first.
Because it’s not about testing anymore.
It’s about running the business.
🧨 The Bottom Line
Stop writing reports nobody reads.
Stop pretending paperwork equals control.
Your test plan should be alive, changing, and brutally honest — not a shrine to bureaucracy.
Corporate IT doesn’t need another PDF.
It needs a dashboard that breathes, talks, and occasionally swears.
Because if your test plan doesn’t make people think,
it’s just another dead file in the SharePoint graveyard — right next to “Version_Final_FINAL_v8_approved_revised2.docx”.
rgds,
Alex