[operatingthetan]

In my professional consulting experience I've found most of those purported "hard deadlines" as mentioned above were usually arbitrarily defined, in other words: completely made up.

[magicalhippo]

That's an important point. It may be a hard cut-off when the switch happens, but the date for the switch may be malleable.

This is crucial to get surfaced early, along with how painful it is to actually move said date if possible.