Planning a multi-site hardware rollout

Why sequencing matters more than speed

The instinct is to move as fast as possible across every site in parallel. In practice, the first few sites are where you find the problems the plan didn't anticipate — a cabling issue, a compatibility gap, a training gap on the ground. Rolling out everywhere at once means discovering those problems everywhere at once too.

Staging in waves

A staged rollout — a small first wave, a pause to capture what went wrong, then broader waves informed by that — costs a bit of calendar time up front and usually saves much more of it later, because each wave fixes problems before they propagate to the next one.

The rollback plan nobody wants to write

Every site in the rollout needs an explicit path back to the previous state if something goes wrong mid-cutover, even if it's never used. Writing that plan tends to surface risks in the forward plan too — if reverting a change is hard, that's usually a sign the change itself needs more preparation before go-live.