13. Diluted Sign Offs  - Waivers/Exceptions for sign offs   

Symptoms: Various groups and teams provide sign offs to formalize the end of a project phase or to demonstrate completion of a milestone and deliverable. The project’s agreed upon sign offs for deliverables are provided by members of the project team and independent parties. The sign off is supposed to indicate that the stakeholders and owners of the deliverable approve the deliverable and that it has been successfully completed according to a predefined criteria and checklist.  

The value of the sign off is diluted and undermined when stakeholders and owners approve the deliverable with exceptions and waivers. These exceptions and waivers and their corresponding risks are never documented and they eventually linger on without a resolution.  

As an example I have been to several SAP projects where the system has gone live even after the User Acceptance Test participants do not agree with test results, and defects with priority 1 and 2 are still outstanding. These projects have made SAP go/no go decisions with exceptions and issues that are never resolved. The signs off to go-live are provided even though the system does not meet the necessary go/no go criteria and instead project managers provide sign offs for the go/no decision to make an artificial project deadline. These actions in essence negate the value of the sign off process.    

Suggestions: Clearly define the criteria for providing sign offs for deliverables. Also provide the ownership for a deliverable and the intended end user of the deliverable. For instance the development team can program interactive reports for end users but this does not mean that the development team owns the deliverable rather they have been assigned to implement the deliverable.  

For software releases, integration test efforts, cut-over activities the integration test manager and test manager can construct exit and release criteria that must be met and certified with independent parties in order for sign-offs to be granted. 

Any sign-offs that must be granted with exceptions and waivers must be documented with rationale for the exceptions in addition to timetables for resolving the exceptions and the owners for the exceptions. Furthermore an analysis should be conducted and documented for the consequences and risks that the approved exception and waives will present to the project.  

Sign-offs should come from independent parties and also from the owners of the deliverables with few if any exceptions to avoid undermining the authority and value of the sign-off.