Easy to say but sometimes difficult to follow: “Create a solid plan before performing an important project” and this is equally true for migrations! In this article, we discuss the criticality of a robust plan when performing data migrations, alongside some of the key considerations to ensure seamless execution…

Why You Need a Solid Migration Plan

What are some of the reasons it is so important to put appropriate effort into pre-planning a migration project?

Customizations: If your source system has extensive customizations, you must decide which ones will journey be migrated to the new system. Some customizations may be supported out-of-the-box (OOTB) in the target system so you will not need to change the target system. However, others may require either changing the system or mapping data related to customizations to out-of-the-box fields for historical record purposes. Careful planning is required to figure out how to fit customized data into the new system.

Dependencies: Depending on the complexity of your ITSM environment, specific data objects may need to be migrated in a certain order so as to maintain the database’s referential integrity. Migrating tables without careful planning can often compromise the data relationships, causing unexpected problems you did not account for.
Business processes: An ITSM migration is a good opportunity to remove nonstandard business processes and more fully embrace industry best practices, which most ITSM applications support OOTB. Doing so will affect what features you implement in the new system, which in turn informs what data needs to be migrated from the old system.

Moreover, creating a plan help you to break the project down into logical steps that can be executed in sequence rather than trying to do everything all at once.

Pro Tip: Work with an Integration Partner

If you have never performed an ITSM system migration, or if you have not performed one in a while, putting together a robust, cohesive migration plan can be daunting, and important considerations can often be overlooked.

Unlike most IT organizations, which might do an ITSM migration once in five to 10 years, many integration consultants do it all the time and have the experience to develop a comprehensive migration strategy.

Furthermore, a good integration partner will have access to migration tools, such as Precision Bridge ServiceNow Instance Migration. This tool is purpose-built for migrations between Service Management platforms. Leveraging Precision Bridge Data Migration Automation tools eliminates manual migration tasks and scripting shortening the project timeline and reducing errors and frustration.

For more information on how Precision Bridge tools can help streamline your Service Management migration project, contact Precision Bridge today.