This phase provides for production installation and customer acceptance of the software, and requires that all test cases were run to verify the successful software execution, correctness, and completeness.

The Production Turnover/ Deployment Phase of the SDLC includes the scope of work necessary to deploy the final solution into its target production environments plus create guides for installation, system administration, system operations and end-user functionality. In addition, a detailed plan needs to be created for implementing the solution across the organization. The Production Implementation Plan is especially important when the solution will be deployed across a number of environments that are maintained by different organizations.

In addition, a production turnover approval process is required to ensure the receiving organizations have agreed the solution is operating as intended, that their sustainment organizations are trained and ready to assume responsibility for maintaining the solutions, that their help desk organizations are properly trained and ready to support end-users, and formal acknowledgment that the customers or end-user organizations have assumed full control over the solutions.

This approval may not come until after a warranty period has expired to ensure the sustainment and supporting organizations have had adequate time for knowledge transfer, and that no critical bugs show up in the deployed solution.

This phase includes activities spanning deployment of the solution and production turnover to the support and product sustainment groups. Deployment typically involves installation and configuration of software on centralized servers that can be accessed by end-users across the corporate networks or via Internet access. However, today software is also deployed as a component of standalone products, equipment or systems. In those cases, deployment will also include the activities to ship the product out to customers and inter-users, plus assembly of the final solution, where required.

The folks who manage the production environment and sustain the deployed solution are not usually the development folks who were maintaining the engineering and test environments or the software during the development and testing phases. In the production turnover phase, various "Guides" are developed and provided to the production support team to help them understand how to install, maintain, backup and recover the system.

The production support staff also have to be trained fully before they can install and manage the new software or system. In addition, for business-critical applications, it's important that every step involved in standing up the new system, migrating production data, testing the new system, and bringing down the old system are planned, approved and managed carefully. The consequences of a failure at this stage are the shutdown of critical business processes that are enabled by the system, and resulting disruption to the business as a whole. Finally, inter-users must also be trained on both the new system or system enhancements and any changes to the affected business processes.