Appendix G: Production Readiness Checklists

Every production deployment is a contract. You're telling the operations team, the business, and every person who answers the phone at 2am: "This is ready." These checklists are how you keep that promise.

I've watched too many "it worked in the test region" deployments turn into Sev-1 incidents. The pattern is always the same: someone skipped a step they considered obvious, and the obvious thing is exactly what failed. Kwame Mensah keeps a framed printout on his wall at CNB that reads: "Production doesn't care about your intentions." He's right.

Use these checklists as a starting point. Every shop should maintain its own version, tailored to local standards and learned from local scars. The checklists below reflect the minimum bar for systems that process financial transactions, health claims, or government benefits — systems where failure has consequences measured in dollars, reputation, and regulatory citations.

G.1 COBOL Program Readiness Checklist

This checklist applies to every COBOL program being deployed to production, whether it's a new program or a modification to an existing one.

G.1.1 Code Quality and Standards

G.1.2 Error Handling

G.1.3 Performance and Scalability

G.1.4 Logging and Diagnostics

G.2 DB2 Readiness Checklist

This checklist covers DB2 objects (tables, indexes, tablespaces) supporting the deployed COBOL program. Lisa Tran reviews this checklist personally for every CNB production deployment — and she will send back any deployment request that has a blank cell.

G.2.1 Schema and Objects

G.2.2 Indexing and Access Paths

G.2.3 Statistics and Maintenance

G.2.4 Locking and Concurrency

G.2.5 Binding and Packages

G.3 CICS Readiness Checklist

This checklist covers CICS region configuration, program deployment, and transaction setup. It applies to every CICS program deployment — new programs and updates alike.

G.3.1 Region and Resource Definitions

G.3.2 Security Configuration

G.3.3 Monitoring and Operations

G.3.4 Testing and Validation

G.4 Batch Readiness Checklist

This checklist covers batch jobs, JCL, scheduling, and operational procedures. Rob Calloway at CNB treats the nightly batch window like a space launch — everything on the checklist is verified before the window opens.

G.4.1 JCL Review

G.4.2 Checkpoint/Restart

G.4.3 Scheduling and Dependencies

G.4.4 Recovery and Operations

G.5 Security Readiness Checklist

This checklist covers security configuration for the deployed application. Ahmad Rashidi at Pinnacle Health won't sign off on any deployment that hasn't passed this checklist — and he's right to insist.

G.5.1 RACF Profiles

G.5.2 Encryption and Data Protection

G.5.3 Audit and Compliance

G.6 Disaster Recovery Readiness Checklist

This checklist covers DR preparedness for the deployed application. Sandra Chen at FBA learned the hard way that a DR plan you haven't tested is a DR plan you don't have.

G.6.1 Backup and Replication

G.6.2 Recovery Procedures

G.6.3 DR Testing

G.7 Deployment Sign-Off

Before any production deployment, the following roles must sign off:

Deployment window: ________

Rollback procedure documented: Yes / No

Rollback tested: Yes / No

Estimated deployment time: ________

Post-deployment validation plan: ________

G.8 Post-Deployment Validation

After deployment, verify the following within the first production cycle:

A note on checklist culture. Checklists work only if people actually use them, and people will only use them if they're maintained. A 200-item checklist that hasn't been updated in three years is worse than no checklist at all — it creates false confidence. Review these checklists quarterly. Remove items that no longer apply. Add items for every production incident that a checklist item could have prevented. The best checklists are living documents, scarred by experience.