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Practical resources · Migration planning worksheet
Migration planning checklist
Work through the decisions and checks that make a move manageable.
Free to use. No sign-up. Work through this with the colleagues closest to the problem.
Scope and accountability
- Define the business outcome, source and target systems, included history and exclusions.
- Name business, data, technical and acceptance owners. Agree who can make go/no-go decisions.
- Identify retention, confidentiality, access and client-specific requirements with the appropriate owners.
Understand and prepare the data
- Profile completeness, uniqueness, validity and relationships using representative data.
- Document field mappings, transformations, reference data and exception handling.
- Agree who fixes issues, where fixes happen and how changes are controlled.
Rehearse and validate
- Set acceptance criteria before moving data: counts, balances, relationships and business scenarios.
- Rehearse with approved data and permissions. Measure duration, throughput and manual effort.
- Record rejected records and reconcile results with business owners. Test downstream integrations and reporting.
Cutover and stabilisation
- Plan freezes, final changes, sequence, dependencies, communications and support cover.
- Define rollback triggers, decision deadlines and a rehearsed recovery approach.
- Obtain documented acceptance, monitor the live service and resolve exceptions.
- Decommission old copies only after agreed validation, retention and recovery needs are satisfied.
A practical starting point to adapt to your organisation, rather than a substitute for project-specific decisions.