As a SysAdmin that does both programming and DBA work, I had enough excitement for a lifetime.
Now I actively engineer my stuff to be boring. ERP upgrades are meticulously planned. We had zero even Sev2 issues. Plenty of small niche stuff that's like a Sev3 or 4, but no show stoppers because everything had a thorough list to go through. For the departments that did any testing and followed the lists.
One department made it unfortunately clear they had never logged into the new system and had lied about doing any testing whatsoever. I don't count that as a fault and neither did the CEO, he handled that.
Whole cutover took 2 hours to do all the checks, we had done it enough in testing environments and wrote simple procedures for every step. As you did them, check box green. When entire list was green, you went home.
No significant new issues found, aside from that one department that was screaming but per CEO I went home with job well done. Said department got a chance to test in live over the weekend, and was told to present their list to me at 10am on Monday.
Assuming proper budget/headcount and competent management, excitement is a failure. Obviously barring extreme unlikely events like something exploding or catching on fire. Management should know all meaningful business risks, IT folks should have checklists for any known pain points, and infrastructure should be designed to be reliable or it should be actively being replaced.
Chaos is easy. Boring is hard.
