Extract from Jed Cassinelli’s article “3 Tips to Ensure More Successful Data Migrations”
Signing on for new software can be intimidating—training staff, updating internal documentation, and evolving your go-to workflows are no small feats. But it’s well worth the effort once you’re on the other side and seeing the benefits to your resources and bottom line.
A more troublesome barrier to entry than these growing pains, though, is data migration. Starting new projects fresh in a slick new platform is intensely satisfying. But migrating ongoing projects from one system to another? Not so much.
Fortunately, there are ways—and tools—to help make these tasks as painless as possible.
#1: Build out a detailed project plan in advance of migration.
As with any project, good planning up front can be the difference between success and failure. Although data migrations are a one-time logistical effort and not particularly glamorous, they should be treated like any other project: Define clear expectations and communicate any project benefits to stakeholders early and often.
On the path to good planning, make sure you cover these considerations:
Provide clear communications and expectations early on to everyone involved. Reach out to your IT and data migration teams, litigation support and legal, and any other teams who will be involved. Make sure everyone is on the same page about roles and responsibilities, and keep lines of communication open about project requirements, dependencies, and other timeline considerations.
Establish thoughtful project prioritization and management guidelines to scale appropriately. Begin by isolating highly active or special cases ahead of the migration project to ensure they’re managed with timeliness in mind. You can also run a few tests on less critical projects or data sets as an opportunity to troubleshoot issues—like account access, network connection quality and bandwidth, storage configurations, previously unidentified requirements or conflicting apps, and any other communication issues that may arise as the project progresses.
Plan based upon a thorough understanding of infrastructure to ensure stability throughout the project. This includes awareness of data transfer paths to ensure they are stable and secure, and identifying whether any network changes are needed to make the migration. For example, our team has seen problems with networks that have “low bandwidth” drop intermittently or that are “under construction” such that they’re set up one way but scheduled to change.
Identify and exclude junk proactively whenever possible. Migrations are an excellent opportunity to clean house in an effort to save money or implement new information governance practices. Deleting and archiving old cases makes migrations much smoother and more cost-efficient.
