Migrations are often overcomplicated by uninformed decisions made by business and technical staff. These decisions – be they technical, time line, budgetary, or inappropriate process chaining – can cause undue stress on a project and, at its worst, cause a project to halt in its tracks.
“We all know how stellar the Coherence migration teams are, and it is hard to believe, but they have upped it a notch. This team not only has delivered high quality, consistent work in a political nightmare environment, but they have uncovered new business. This is the synergy we have been speaking to for years – how these guys as technical experts can bring in additional products and services because they are so highly technically-skilled.”
Both the technical and project management aspects of the migration are less complicated to Coherence because we do this work daily and have been for (many of us) a decade. Over time we have learned the ins and outs of the core components of the migration (Active Directory, Exchange, Other Nos/Messaging systems, Network, and Workstation) and have been able to work with the stuff laying around the core like applications and hardware devices dependent on the core. Knowing the tasks, order of precedence, and how to adapt our methodology to any given situation allows us to be great at what we do. Unfortunately we are not always there at the beginning when some of the decisions mentioned above are made. Projects where we are involved from the onset have the highest chance of success!
The benefits of any migration are realized by meeting the business objectives and will differ from project to project. By that we mean merger, acquisition, and/or divesture projects all have completely different goal sets where different benefits are realized by the business and end users.
In the classic sense, most see migration as a reduction of assets and domain/exchange footprints, or simplifying the end user experience in a way that provides a simplified login or an easier way of communication and collaboration. We see migration as an opportunity to simplify and redesign if required. Although this may not always be a project goal or a decision we are involved due to timing of our involvement we see this as a goal that should be part of the migration process. Simplicity provides a whole set of different benefits to a business including reduction in support/maintenance costs, complexity, and providing an ability for workers to maximize productivity and efficiency.