False‑Ready Audit: Find When 'Ready for Production' Is a Performance, Not a Fact

Organizations routinely call work 'ready' while hidden conditions—configuration drift, undocumented dependencies, stale runbooks, observability gaps, or untested rollback paths—leave launches fragile. This episode introduces the False‑Ready Audit: a compact, tool‑agnostic diagnostic you can run in 30–90 minutes to surface where readiness is performative rather than operational. Mirko contrasts the business impulse to mark progress (ship dates, demos, stakeholder signals) with IT's deeper readiness signals (dependency ownership, monitoring baselines, restoration plan). Listeners get a copy‑paste Ready Truth Table (owner alignment, critical dependencies, test surface, observability baseline, rollback rule, compliance check) and a reproducible 7‑day sampling experiment: score five recent 'ready' items, compute the truth gap, and prioritize fixes. A generalized consulting vignette shows a declared‑ready rollout that degraded service for a day; Mirko models scoring on‑air and gives clear, cross‑role actions to reduce surprise and make 'ready' mean the same thing for everyone.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-it-it-business--6867401/support.To continue the conversation, follow Mirko Peters on LinkedIn, where more insights and real-world examples are shared from both business and IT perspectives.