November 9, 2020
When approaching any large and complex project such as a Data Center Migration, your efforts need to be well organized in order to achieve success. This organization usually takes the form of project plans. At different parts of the migration project, there will be more and more details that need to be organized and sequenced.
Our data center move method usually involves high-level plans, migration strategies and detail-plans which are built at different stages (or phases) of the project.
For detail-plans, there are usually several developed (with our help in facilitated planning sessions) depending on the number of teams involved from both infrastructure and application areas.
Breaking-Down The Data Center Migration Project Plan
Let’s take a look at an example of sections of a data center migration project plan that helps to organize the data migration effort. Each of these plan sections can be reduced to a single “key word”:
Gather / Determine / Alter / Execute / Clean
Gather: In this starting section we don’t know what we don’t know — so we list tasks that will help this team accumulate this information. “Gather the needed inventory”, for example.
Determine: In this area, we list tasks that will help us figure out what we will do with the information collected in the first set of tasks such as “Determine who owns this application”.
Alter: Once most of the decisions have been made in the previous section, some tasks will be needed to prepare for the move. This section lists all the tasks to do that.
Execute: These tasks are the general steps needed to relocate the items covered in this plan. Usually more details are created in technical task lists and sequenced in the Hour by Hour (playbook) plan that controls the actual Move Event.
Clean: These tasks deal with things that should be performed after the execution of the data center migration, by this team. It is an all-important, often-missed set of activities.
Different teams and data migration projects will dictate the exact number of detail plans and (of course) if these main 5 sections are sufficient to accomplish the goals of the data center migration. Using a solid method with time-proven results will help you to mitigate risk and to execute a successful move project.
Engage Altus Technologies Corporation today and we’ll help you get started with your own data center migration project plan! See our data center resources here – including materials on data center relocations & data center migrations.
