June 25, 2021
The complexity of a data center migration can be staggering. There are components and applications and various application teams and stakeholders all supporting critical business functions. Keeping ahead of these complex set of interrelationships during a longer project such as a migration is critical. Thankfully, when it comes data center services and migrating a business’s existing data into a new data center, we have you covered. Altus has been able to consistently achieve extremely positive results through our unique style of project management and planning. We use a hybrid project management model called the Iterative Waterfall. It’s a cross between traditional waterfall-style management and agile project management. It is a value-driven model and methodology that allows us to deliver quality migration projects while being highly responsive to changes requested by stakeholders. It is a form of project management that is often used for projects that contain many unknowns, which is fairly characteristic of data center migrations.
It’s not uncommon in migration projects to be constantly discovering new dependencies throughout the process, which means your IT team needs to handle numerous changes to any developed plans. Migration-cost overruns and/or long delays when working with items & issues related to the data center relocation or migration can result in these “discovery phases” and will often cripple the project. This is the exact environment that the Iterative Waterfall thrives in, as it is all about embracing change and dealing with it whenever you look to migrate your data. This is even the case late in the planning/development stages! Altus has adapted our data center migration process to use on virtually any project that deals with migrating your current data. With the I.W. process, we can deliver a transparent migration plan that delivers tremendous value to your business operations, all while minimizing downtime, being able to handle change, and still tightly manage costs, time, and overall scope. We have found that our approach allows us to develop a robust project management plan that can tightly manage your entire data center move and control the decommissioning portions of the project.
Iterative Practice Makes Perfect
One data center migration best practice that we have adopted as part of our model is making several passes or iterations through the planning cycle and incorporating any new information as it is discovered. With each new iteration, the project plan gains more and more detail. This allows the initial high-level plan to evolve through the iterations until it becomes the final detailed plan. The final detailed plan will then become the foundation for the Hour-by-Hour plan. Ultimately, this migration strategy helps us work with you towards a successful data center migration for your organization.
A strong value in our iterative approach is that it allows all stakeholders to provide information to the project UP TO the building of the Hour-by-Hour plans (“Playbooks”). This keeps stakeholders engaged in the planning process and makes them responsible for any tradeoffs of schedule versus scope that their information might generate. The process generates high satisfaction with the final project results, post-migration. Working with the project team, the stakeholders are also involved in the acceptance or rejection of any changes to project requirements, or to the priorities of the project. This increased information flow also contributes to greater satisfaction and confidence from our clientele towards Altus, and tends to generate a deeper sense of peace of mind as the migration or relocation unfolds.
Questions or comments on our process? Ready to set-up your data center relocation or data center migration? Contact Altus to initiate!
