3 Ways To Speed Up Migration to Dynamics365
Migrating to Dynamics365 is a notoriously long-running and complex project, taking organisations months, or even years. This article outlines the three stages of the project that absorb the most time, and shares tactics on how to drive efficiency at each step. So you can cut your migration time from months to weeks.
Planning your Migration
This is often the most time-intensive stage of most migration projects. It’s difficult because organisations typically don’t have documentation to map existing systems, processes, and information outputs. These assets are not typically readily available in most organisations, and creating them is a huge drain on project time.
Speed up this stage by:
Applying a framework approach can dramatically speed up the process of documenting the existing data landscape, by utilising your business teams to support the work. We follow this framework to map the existing data landscape.
Fixing Quality Issues
Documenting your data landscape typically identifies a wide range of existing or potential quality issues that need resolution. Some, like de-duplicating values, or transforming formats, are easy. Others, like filling in missing values, uncover a dependency on the business. And often, there’s no easy way to communicate with the business about this stuff. So the project is disrupted by months of back-and-forth email chains, and data quality checks.
Speed up this stage by:
Nominating a business evangelist in each department to take responsibility for data corrections. Create a reusable method to test and re-test data as corrections are submitted, so you can track progress. Investing in business-friendly tools to support data remediation can also really help this stage.
Moving the Data
This is often the most flexible project stage, as data teams can choose methods and scope effort based on their methodology. However, teams often spend a lot of time building and testing complex infrastructure when simpler solutions are available. This can cause scope creep and create dependencies on key team members for future maintenance of highly technical solutions.
Speed up this stage by:
Utilising bespoke migration tools can halve the work because they are already pre-mapped to the Dynamics data model. Many of these tools also speed up the testing phase by providing staging infrastructure for testing, and the best will provide in-built dashboards to track progress. It also pays to take an iterative, rather than a ‘big bang’ approach to migration, to minimise widespread issues and apply any learnings as you go.
Need help applying these techniques?
At Think Evolve Solve, we help businesses to speed up their migration projects. Following experience delivering migration projects across multiple industries, our team developed a dedicated tool to help reduce the time and effort to migrate data to popular tools like Microsoft Dynamics, Snowflake, Azure, and more. Find out more about the solution here.