Tue, 21 January 202510:58:00 GMT
Keeping tabs on migration processes
To manage migration processes such as adopting a new data integration tool or rehosting applications at scale from one infrastructure service to another, organizations often turn away from established work planning and management tools such as Azure DevOps Boards.
Instead, project managers often develop their own systems based on the trusted spreadsheet, typically Microsoft Excel. While these spreadsheets may be shared with the development team, this approach significantly reduces transparency and results in information redundancy. In addition, the benefits of using an existing tool are lost, perhaps most importantly reporting. When all you have is a hammer, and all that.
Alternatively, existing work items such as user stories and tasks are used to model the migration process, which is an impedance mismatch because "Migrate application X" makes for a terrible user story, tasks must be cloned for each story, the setup is time-consuming and error-prone, and the user interface becomes cluttered due to repetition. When all you have is a hammer, and all that.
Using a dedicated business process model
A better approach is to introduce a new business process, tailored to the task at hand.
Any half-decent work management system will support this sort of tailoring. For example, with Azure DevOps, we can add a custom work item type to represent this business process, and with Jira you can create a new workflow.
An example from Azure DevOps, where I have defined a number of new states for the "in progress" category to model a rehosting migration process:
In Azure DevOps, the states and transition rules (for example to restrict transition to a specific state) can be adapted during the project's lifetime, if new requirements emerge. You can add a new portfolio backlog to manage the custom work item type on a separate kanban board.
Using this approach, you reap the full benefits of using a dedicated work management tool and we can let the system take care of reporting rather than having to dedicate a significant portion of time for what's essentially a menial task.