Phase E: Migration Planning

Objective    Approach     Inputs     Steps    Outputs

Objective

The objective of this phase is to sort the various implementation projects into priority order. Activities include assessing the dependencies, costs and benefits of the various migration projects. The prioritized list of projects will go on to form the basis of the implementation plan.

Approach

There are some important questions to be asked before embarking on a migration exercise:

• What are the dependencies of this project on other activities?
• What products are needed?
• What components must be developed?
• Does the organization have the resources needed to develop such components?
• What standards are the products or components built on?
• When will they be available?
• Will the products stand the test of time, both because of the technology they use and also because of the viability of the supplier?
• What is the cost of retraining the users?
• What is the likely cultural impact on the user community, and how can it be controlled?
• What is the total cost of the migration, and what benefits will it deliver? It is important to look at actual benefits, and not presumed benefits. Is the funding available?
• Is the migration viable?

Many things affect the answers to these questions, including the current and future architectures, the size of the organization and its complexity, and the value of technology to the core functions of the organization. Other things to consider are the asset value of the current systems, and the level of risk associated with changing the solution and/or the supplier.

Most organizations find a change of architecture has too much impact on the organization to be undertaken in a single phase. Migration often requires consideration of a number of technical issues, not the least of which are associated with the means of introducing change to operational systems.

Issues requiring special consideration may include:

• parallel operations
• choices of proceeding with phased migration by subsystem or by function
• the impact of geographical separation on migration

The decisions resulting from these considerations should be incorporated in the implementation plan.

The Migration Planning phase allows the individual projects or work packages to be sorted into a series of plateaus, each of which can be achieved in a realistic time scale.

Inputs

Inputs to this phase are:

• Request for Architecture Work
• Statement of Architecture Work
• Business Architecture - Version 2
• Technical Architecture - Version 1
• Impact Analysis - Project list

Steps

Key steps in this phase include:

1. Project prioritization
2. Migration brainstorm session
3. Dependencies, costs and benefits assessment of the various migration projects
4. Risk assessment
5. Roadmap (time-lined) generation
6. Impact Analysis - Migration Plan documentation

Outputs

The output of this phase is:

• Impact Analysis - Migration Plan

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