Discover the significance of key dates during Cutover. We will dive into early milestone definition, technical and functional details, and the frozen zone.

Early milestone alignment / frozen zone
Internal stakeholders need to be informed early on potential downtime during cutover. Within the Frozen zone all business activities come to a still stand.
Business activities for managing capacity (pre-production / safety stock alignment / pre shipment) needs to be setup with all Business / IT Areas.
Early milestone alignment is done on granularity day. For global cutover planning a concept to handle time zones / time shifts needs to be setup

What is a Key Date list?
A KeyDateList is a collection of overall milestones ramp down / ramp up
o Assigned to workstreams
o Estimated start / Duration / end
o Collect all technical activities 
o Collect all business activities for ramp down upfront data migration 
o Collect all business activities for ramp up 

For global scale projects a template needs to be initialized on which afterwards local KeyDateLists are derived. 
For further detailing (assignees, interdependencies, hourly scheduling) the KeyDateLists are later to be uploaded to the cutover tool as base for Cutover plans.

Considering technical details
Examples of technical tasks to be considered:
o downtime approach
o data migration approach
o User management approach

Considering functional details
Examples of functional tasks to be considered:
Logistic 
o Last orders
o Last deliveries
o Last production
o First production
o First new orders
o First deliveries

Accounting
o Last Invoices
o Last payment runs
o Monthly / Annual closing activities
o First payment runs
o First invoices