We completed a three month long Data Migration project recently moving a large amount of data from one PDM environment into another, similar, but different, environment. We hit our originally projected Go-Live date and went live with full data integrity and met all originally identified requirements of the migration.

However, there were some lessons learned during the project, based on a few speed bumps that we hit as we were bearing in on our Go-Live weekend. The main lesson learned, and the one that I want to touch on today is this:

Identify and Communicate Project Milestone Deadlines Early and Often:

When project deadlines are originally being identified and considered, all parties should be involved in the process of defining the actual deadlines; this includes the Business, the Customer technical team and the Contractor performing the Data Migration.

In the case of this project the Customer based a major project Milestone Deadline on an analysis of the LOE from the proposal we delivered to them. This is fine in and of itself, but, the customer was entering into a contract with the parent of a divested business unit to have their data out of the source environment by a certain date without first consulting with us in depth on the proposed date.

Because of the sequential nature of many of the Data Migration tasks identified in the project plan, our projected calendar date stretched beyond the dates that could be inferred from the Proposal LOE.

As a result, a high degree of urgency was injected into the early and middle parts of the project as we redesigned our project plan and processes to accommodate the unexpectedly looming deadline. Consequently, we had to absorb a greater amount of risk as time to test new processes and software fixes was abbreviated.

Thanks to the efforts of the talented Customer technical team and our own Data Migration team, we were able to absorb the risk without incident, but it’s always safer than sorry.