Data migration: Staff for success

the most common question I ask myself is: ‘Is the team for the project aware of the extent of the manipulations to migrate the data and how long will the company have to participate in the game? data from the digital transformation program? ‘

There is no specific answer to this question because it is based on several factors:

  1. What has been contractually agreed in time and deliverable;
  2. Is the existing production data managed efficiently ?;
  3. What is the functional knowledge of the new system for customers in each area: accounting, procurement and inventory management, sales, marketing, human resources, maintenance, customer service, etc. .;
  4. Are these experts available to enter the continuous process and data improvement project for three months, six months, or even a year, depending on the scale of operations and geographic scope;
  5. / li>

Determine that the Functional Data Analyst is now commonly accepted to represent the competence of being functionally competent in one or more of Oracle, SAP, Dynamics, Zoho CRM, Salesforce, Hubspot and more; while also having designed, mapped and transformed the data for a complete transformation cycle. These roles are increasingly becoming the key to success in the overall data migration program.

Client resources involved

The involvement of client resources occurs at two levels:

  1. The business team responsible for describing the requirements of the new transformation model, namely the specific needs of users and the specifications of functional requirements;
  2. Business team members from each market who must answer questions about their mapping and transformation results from the data review and performed during the audit in the final business environment;
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We will assume that the project team is fully staffed and now the data understanding work for market-level clean-up activities is being planned.

No one knows the data like the people who feed and maintain it.

Scope of specifications for data migration

When the agreement is approved at the start of a project, we set the framework for the engagement.

The specifications detail who does what and how the company and the service provider will define what must be done, how, when, where and by whom.

In general the proposal addresses the subject of a contract data is vague and generally indicates that something of the kind shows that the data is ready and fit to be loaded into the new platform or word of this effect.

It is recommended that you convert what are commonly referred to as runtime activities that include all of the following:

  • Define the target data model by module according to the degree of the scope of the work;
  • Supports the design phase with changes to the target data model based on all locations;
  • Create loader programs to load each module from the old system into the target platform;
  • Creates the snippet in the data transformation programs according to the transformation logic defined by the company;
  • Create the load program containing all the data objects and all the activities necessary to complete a load cycle;
  • Reports on the state of faults in data transformation, data extraction and data loading in the fault tracking platform of each of the modules according to the loading cycle;

Data migration and complexity assessment

The effort to create programs and perform data conversions varies from the love to the very complex. The complexity of the conversion is defined by many factors.
In order to effectively build an execution plan around data conversion efforts, it is important to be able to assess the complexity of each data conversion object. To do this, it is best to understand the effort required to build to maintain proportions of a data conversion and aggregating the individual efforts to create a complete picture of the effort required by data module conversion.

Data migration in determining complexity

During the drawings from plans to planning and realization, there will not be enough information to accurately assess the effort that will be required to create a data conversion object. It will be important to make an educated guess based on past experiences with a conversion similar to that of this effort.

For the purpose of realization planning, it will suffice to categorize the design of the construction and test activities that constitute a data conversion as simple, moderate, complex or very complex.

Once a data conversion is classified under these terms, an effort estimate will be provided.

During execution, once all conversion programs have been identified, documented, mapped, reviewed and verified, a revised level of complexity will be assigned to each of the data modules to be migrated. This level of complexity equates to a number of days of effort required to fully implement the project.