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Your Roadmap to a Successful Data Platform Migration.

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Evolving your data capabilities in a rapid and pragmatic way. 

Our previous blog outlined three strategies to follow when considering a legacy data platform migration project.  

  • Take the time to understand your business needs and priorities first.
  • Deliver value quickly, think agile and business-centric.  
  • Build a team that can execute.

So you’ve decided to migrate your data to the cloud. Now what? Where do you start? What approach do you adopt to mitigate risks, drive faster time to value in a predictable and scalable way?  We’ve often heard our clients ask these similar questions. So, we decided to share our four-step process to a successful data platform migration project. 

1. Strategy & Roadmap  

Building out a roadmap is your strategic game plan or blueprint to success. Your first step is defining your future state. 

Strategy & roadmap

Define your future state
Start with your end goal in mind and use that to identify the changes to be made. What does that journey look like? Where are the gaps? An example of an end goal or business outcome could be reducing IT spend by only paying for the computing you need. 

Gap assessment

Gap assessment
To help forge a path forward and identify your priorities, your assessment should include people, process and technology gaps. Determining if you have the right skills and knowledge, processes and technology to adopt a whole new paradigm shift from an on-premise to cloud-based is a critical step to building a successful roadmap.

Planning
Once your gaps are identified, next is determining how you go about closing that gap. Your gap plan should be based on your business priorities or needs. One of the simplest ways is to tackle the low-effort, high-value items first. In a complicated or dynamic environment, there are several different methodologies that you can use, such as RICE. Still, often something as simple as effort and value is an easy way to help prioritize. 

2. Design & Validate 

Step two is taking the business priorities and designing a minimum viable product that will unlock business outcomes from your key priorities quickly and in a repeatable way. In comparison to a proof of concept, an MVP is not a throwaway. It helps validate patterns and establish a foundation for your program or product to grow and expand.  

3. Learn & Expand

Use the MVP learnings to remove blockers to gaining the alignment, trust, and buy-in you need in order to expand to the next phase. Focus on establishing a pattern that’s repeatable, scalable and trustworthy that will meet the business needs today and in the future. This is how you will onboard new stakeholders and expand your MPV into an enterprise-wide solution.  

4. Review & Communicate

The final step to a successful legacy platform migration project is to adopt a transparent process by involving the business at every stage along the way. Typically we use three different touchpoints with our clients. 

  • When working directly with the stakeholder, having bi-weekly touchpoints is a great way to maintain a pulse on the business needs through granular feedback and an opportunity to demonstrate your progress.
  • Monthly touchpoints are used to discuss overall project progress and quarterly targets. Broader business unit stakeholders are often involved and often use this as an opportunity to share status updates, results and knowledge transfer.
  • And finally, quarterly updates allow for the opportunity to validate project value, share learnings and focus on the quarter ahead. It also provides a forum for transparency and accountability.

All these touchpoints working together at different granularity levels ensure all stakeholders are engaged and invested in the outcomes. 

The success of your legacy data platform migration boils down to these four steps. 

  1. Understand the business needs and align around a shared vision of success. 
  2. Don’t build something that only gets thrown away. Build an MVP to validate, establish trust and credibility.   
  3. Use the learnings to adjust and move forward with a broader scope. 
  4. And finally, continuously meet and adjust your plans accordingly.

Want to see what it looks like in action? Check out our recent success story and learn how HBC successfully migrated their legacy data platform to a cloud-based platform with this process.

Three strategies for a successful data platform migration (and a webinar to show you how).

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To skip to the “how” – and watch the recording here to learn how Gensquared and Snowflake helped HBC migrate their old legacy platform to Snowflake’s Data Cloud.   

Companies of all sizes struggle with ageing and outdated legacy data platforms. They are expensive to maintain, difficult to scale or have limited integration capabilities. Most businesses desire data-driven insights but are quickly realizing their outdated legacy platforms impact their ability to make informed business decisions.   

data platform migration strugglesThe decision to migrate from an old legacy platform to a cloud-based data platform can feel daunting, but the benefits far outweigh the risks.  By keeping in mind the following three strategies for a successful data platform migration, you are setting yourself, your team and your project up for success.

Understand your own biases and the things you don’t know. 

If there is one thing to know about biases, it’s that we all have them. And when faced with uncertainty, we tend to fall back on our previous experiences as guidance. How you approached your last IT project may not be the best predictor of what will work today. You could be in a different organization or teams, with varying skill sets, culture and potentially different technology. Each project requires its own approach to delivery. Take the time to understand your business needs and break up the work effort to align with those needs. Avoid building a project plan that is not aligned with those who are doing the work or doesn’t derive a lot of value quickly. Bottom line, don’t try to apply old patterns or solutions to a new and unique problem.  

Take an agile and business-centric approach.

Focus on delivering value for the business as often and as early as possible. Approach this by understanding what your business users need, what they consider valuable and then marry up your technical solution to serve their needs. Businesses are dynamic and not static. People come and go, leadership changes and business priorities change. And factor in external forces like a pandemic – you need a team and a plan that is highly flexible and adaptable.    

Build a team that can execute.

Sell with data science in under 60 days

There are many reasons why a data platform migration project can fail. Not having a data team with the right skills and experience ranks right up at the top. The proliferation of data coupled with the need to quickly gain access to data insights is placing businesses & IT leaders under immense pressure. However, most organizations lack the knowledge around building a data management strategy and the skills to execute. Depending on your organization’s data & analytics maturity, consider a blended team vs outsourcing the entire project altogether. Perhaps you need to augment to address a skills gap or meet aggressive timelines. Or you simply don’t have a team in place to execute.  Regardless of your reasons, a blended team helps you build your own internal capabilities and establish a faster knowledge transfer by retaining it internally. 

“Theory is splendid but until put into practice, it is valueless.”  James Cash Penney

In theory, overcoming biases, taking an iterative approach to delivering results using a blended team all sound great, but how realistic is it? 

Watch the recorded webinar and learn just how realistic it was for HBC. Hear how they followed these three principles and successfully migrated their legacy platforms to Snowflake’s Data Cloud to create a single view of their customer retail analytics and decrease costs, all within very aggressive timelines.   

This is a chat you don’t want to miss! Watch the regarding now.  

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