At some point, to meet the regulatory deadline, projects are taken out of scope and the excluded objectives are added as a separate project initiative intended to be completed after the merger and close the merger and acquisition project as a successful project. During one of the largest merger and acquisition projects, 2 larger financial institutions merged using the big bang approach on transition day. Despite testing the entire wallet merger scenario several times, the increased volume could not cope with transaction posting on time, causing customer inconvenience. Although the system's ability to deal with the problem doubled overnight, the problem lasted a few days, tarnishing the brand's reputation for months to come. Many lessons were learned during the failed project and the failure was attributed to the poorly conceived cutover strategy, which failed to capture a key timing risk such as mid-month versus month-end/quarter-end, identifying the key risk involved with incremental implementation compared to large bang approach and test system identical to that of actual production