Who attends the go/no-go meeting?
The meeting needs one decision-maker with authority to stop, the owner of every criterion on the checklist, the business lead who accepts the change on behalf of users, the support or service owner who will run the system afterwards, the vendor lead where one is contracted, and someone recording the decision. Everyone else receives the outcome.
One decision, one decision-maker
The most common failure in a go/no-go meeting is that nobody in the room is unambiguously allowed to say no. A committee can advise, but the decision needs a single named person with the authority to stop a change that has months of work and a public date behind it. That is usually the sponsor or the service owner, depending on whether the risk being weighed is business impact or operational stability.
Their name is written in the cutover plan before the meeting, along with the name of the delegate who decides if they are unavailable. A delegate without the same authority is not a delegate; it is a deferral.
The criterion owners
Every criterion on the checklist has an owner, and each owner attends to answer for their own line. This is what keeps the meeting short. The owner states the status, states the evidence, and answers questions on their area. Nobody speaks on behalf of a criterion they did not verify.
| Role | Answers for |
|---|---|
| Technical or infrastructure lead | Environments, deployment, capacity, backups, monitoring |
| Data or migration lead | Dry-run results, reconciliation, cleansing, outstanding data defects |
| Test lead | Execution status, open defects by severity, regression and performance results |
| Business or process lead | Training, workarounds, user acceptance sign-off, verification team |
| Support or service owner | Support model, hypercare rota, known errors, access, service acceptance |
| Security or compliance | Approvals, controls, regulatory or audit conditions where they apply |
| Vendor or supplier lead | Contracted deliverables, third-party readiness, their own cover during the window |
The Go/No-Go Checklist names the owner against each criterion, which doubles as the invitation list.
The chair and the recorder
The chair runs the agenda and is usually the delivery lead. Chairing is not deciding: the chair keeps the meeting to the criteria, stops it turning into a technical discussion, and puts the recommendation to the decision-maker at the end.
Someone records. Not notes of the debate, but the decision, the date and time it was made, who made it, which criteria were not met, which waivers were granted and by whom, and what mitigations were attached. That record is what an auditor asks for, and it is what the post-implementation review reads six weeks later when nobody remembers the reasoning. Running the meeting covers the agenda and the recording format.
Who does not need to be there
People who are affected by the decision but do not own a criterion do not need to attend. Wider programme members, adjacent project managers, communications, and the long tail of interested stakeholders all need the outcome quickly and none of them need the meeting. A meeting of thirty people does not scrutinise criteria; it watches a presentation.
Two exceptions are worth making. Someone who will be executing the window may attend as an observer, because hearing the conditions attached to a go is more useful than reading them. And where a waiver is likely, the person who would have to approve it should be present rather than reached by phone afterwards.
Attendance and authority are different things
It is worth separating three positions before the invitation goes out. Who decides — one person. Who must be consulted before the decision — the criterion owners, whose views are on the record. Who is informed — everyone else, immediately afterwards. A programme with a RACI already has this written down; the go/no-go meeting is simply the sharpest place it gets tested. The Project Charter & Kickoff Pack holds the RACI those decision rights come from.
The vendor question
Where a supplier is delivering part of the change, their lead attends and answers for their own criteria. What they cannot do is take the decision, because the consequences of a bad go-live sit with the organisation running the service. Where the contract ties a payment milestone to go-live, that interest belongs on the table rather than under it: the decision-maker should know which of the people in the room are paid on the outcome.
Timing and quorum
The meeting is held late enough that the evidence is real and early enough that a no-go still leaves time to stand the window down and tell users. If a criterion owner cannot attend, they send their status and evidence in writing beforehand and name someone who can answer questions on it. A criterion with nobody to answer for it is not met, whatever the last update said.
The readiness picture put in front of the room should be the same one that has been tracked for weeks, not a fresh document. The Go Live Readiness Deck presents the scorecard, exit criteria and fallback in the format the decision is taken against, and the go-live checklist covers the underlying items each owner is reporting on.
Questions
Should the whole steering committee attend?
Rarely. The steering committee sets the criteria and receives the outcome; the go/no-go meeting is worked through by the people who own the criteria.
What if the decision-maker is unavailable?
A named delegate with the same authority decides, agreed in advance and recorded in the cutover plan. Postponing the decision usually costs more than delegating it.
Can the meeting be held over a call?
Yes, provided the checklist is on screen and the record is written as the meeting runs. What matters is that every criterion owner is reachable and answers for their own line.
How long should it take?
If the criteria have been tracked properly, most of the meeting is confirmation. Time is spent only on criteria that are not met and on the waiver decisions attached to them.