Before implementing any IT project it is important that it has been carefully planned and this is just as true for a Service Management Migration Project. Whether you are moving to a new Greenfield instance to get back to the baseline out of the box apps, consolidating multiple instances into one, or splitting one instance into multiple targets, you and your migration team should work out some important details together beforehand to ensure the project goes off without a hitch.
In this article, we discuss a few key questions to review with your migration team before starting work on a Service Management migration project.
Customization and Data Questions
The first set of questions relative to your existing Service Management environment: what you will keep, what will be discarded and what will be added for the new system.
How much customization was applied to the source environment and how much will you keep?
Custom functionality can often be difficult to migrate from one Service Management environment to another, even when both are instances of the same platform. Factors to consider in relation to this question include:
What, if any, of the custom functionality is available “out of the box” (OOTB) in the target environment?
Whether the business processes supported by the customizations are still needed. Can you transition to industry best practices instead?
For any customizations that you do migrate, how will you migrate the code and data models for those customizations?
If it is not practicable to run your business without a specific customization, use the migration as an opportunity to review and check whether there is a more efficient way of implementing it on the new system. Remember, however, that when migrating the data related to these customizations, it must be transformed to fit any new data model.
Data Questions
Is there any data that should be left behind?
A better way to ask it might be: If my users no longer had access to the old data, what would happen? The reality is that in most cases, it would make their lives much more difficult because they would lose accumulated knowledge and would have to start all over with trend reporting, among other issues. For a seamless transition, migrating transactional data, such as incident tickets, change requests, and problem tickets, is often the best course of action together with asset and knowledge data. The best practice is if in doubt make sure the data is available on the new system.
What about performance issues?
If there were existing performance issues on the previous system then it is important to establish whether these were due to the volume of data and also whether this will be naturally improved by the new system or if the volume of data may need to be reduced. If there is any possibility of not taking data over to the new system then this must be considered very carefully.
Can we migrate and still meet our compliance obligations?
Businesses subject to regulations or standards such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS must be mindful of the security of that data before, during, and after the migration. Also, if any data will not be migrated then will it be archived and how can it be accessed in the future?
Migration Approach Questions
These might be the most important questions of all because the answer can make the difference between project success and failure. Gartner’s research has shown that 86% of migration projects fail or overrun in terms of time and costs.
Who will perform the migration?
It is important to check the level of experience of those involved in the migration. Not only their experience of migration projects but also of the source and target systems. Application level experience can also be highly valuable in determining the correct migration approach.
What tools can we leverage to streamline the migration?
Far too often data migration is attempted using manual, time-consuming and error prone processes which is why there is such a high failure rate to deliver on time and to budget. This explains why integrators have said in the past “Have a fresh start. Leave your data behind”. It has just been too difficult to get it right. Leaving data behind is no longer a choice given the focus on service excellence, knowing your customers/employees and leveraging Artificial Intelligence.
There are tools that automate migration making it quicker and easier than ever to get your data where you want it. There is no need to leave data behind because it is too difficult or expensive to move it anymore and there is no need to use spreadsheets or scripts to get it done. Precision Bridge automates data migration for you whether it is knowledge, assets, tickets, workflows, attachments, images, journal entries or audit information.
For more information on Precision Bridge ServiceNow Instance Migration tools or to schedule a demo, contact Precision Bridge today.