- A security, legal or procurement review has stalled it.
- There is no written answer to where the data goes or who can see it.
- If the person who built it left, it would stop.
What this phase buys you
It reaches production and stays there. It passes review, and it survives the person who built it leaving.
A written answer covering what data flows where, who can see it, how long it is kept and what the audit trail holds, plus a second person who has deployed a change to it.
Not this. Not a sign off email. A sign off nobody can reconstruct the basis for has to be obtained again next time.
Security and legal have signed it off against a written answer, and more than one person can keep it running.
A demo that is permanently two weeks from production, and a rebuild proposed within eighteen months.
What you actually do
Four moves. None of them needs a platform, and none of them is glamorous. That is the point: this is the work that gets skipped, which is why so many companies are stuck a phase earlier than they think.
Write the answer before you are asked
Four pages: what data flows where, who can see it, how long it is kept, and what the audit trail contains. Written once, reused every time.
Decide who owns it in production
Not who built it. Who keeps it running, and how much of their week that is. Responsibility on top of a full job is not ownership.
Get a second pair of hands in
A system one person can run is a system with a leaving date. Someone else has to have changed it, at least once, before you call it live.
Agree what would make you turn it off
The conditions under which it stops. Agreeing them while everyone is calm is much easier than during the incident.
The usual mistake
Treating review as paperwork at the end. The questions are knowable in advance, and answering them late is what turns two weeks into six months.
- It cannot get approved. The thing works and cannot ship. Security, legal, procurement or a regulator wants an answer that has never been written down, about where data goes, who can see it, or how a decision is evidenced.
- Nobody can keep it running. It was built by a vendor or by one person, and there is no one whose job includes maintaining it. It works until the first change and then quietly stops being used.