I have a checklist for running one of our regression tests. It's pretty robust now that four people (including myself) have gone through it a few times.

I've thought about automating the test, but ultimately decided against it. Part of the checklist is just making sure the tester has the proper logins to the proper servers [1]. Second, if anything breaks in the automated portion, you need to know how it works in order to fix it.

[1] yes, multiple servers. And it takes five hours to run. We've gone to length to simulate as much as possible the production environment.