Mastering Migration: Turning Complex Challenges into Seamless Success

Mastering Migration: Turning Complex Challenges into Seamless Success

Introduction

Network and service transformation projects (or migrations using other terminology) are commonplace activities being undertaken throughout the telecommunications industry.  These initiatives are necessary for companies that want to stay competitive in the marketplace, provide customers with the latest generation of solutions and services, and ensure infrastructure and networking capabilities are continuously modernized to support next generation offerings. Despite the clear need for these transformations, such projects tend to be expensive and time consuming, and CFOs often view them as a cost overhead. Transformation projects have gained a reputation for overrunning, both on time and budget, due to the complexity of the many moving parts that need to be managed. If the approach towards execution and project’s expectations are well-managed with proper governance from the start, however, many of these issues and concerns can be mitigated.

The Importance of Data

Data is a key piece of every transformation or migration project. Oftentimes, transformation projects have a fixed delivery timeline with resource allocated and budget set, but teams start the project with an inadequate view of the challenge ahead. Understanding the data associated with a project is crucial for properly planning and scoping your project.

Here are some examples of the type of data you could use for this purpose:

• How many customers and products are in-scope
• Which customers have which products and infrastructure
• If those customers are still in contract and what the best replacement product or service would be for them

Ideally, a separate, pre-project exercise looking at sizing and estimation should be conducted, which would then feed into the costs and requirements of the larger program. This is better than having such a review as part of an early phase in the main program, as expectations on final outcomes and timelines could have been set from less-than-ideal early data analysis, leading to re-planning and budgeting later as better estimations become available.

Data Cleansing

Whenever a lot of data is involved in a project, you will inevitably have to deal with “dirty data”.   When companies acquire or transfer customers and their estates to other providers or have natural churn, a lot of data is left in its systems that needs to be understood and ultimately accounted for. This is most likely stored in the customer back-end OSS systems and will need to be cleaned before it can be properly leveraged. This can be time-consuming but can be crucial to the success of the project. Planning and costing in explicit time and resources to manage this part of the transformation projects is important, because it prevents incorrect communications with customers that moved on many years ago. Sometimes these customers unknowingly may have been paying for a service they don’t have and as part of the transformation delivery these ghost revenue streams also need to be tidied up which can impact financial bottom lines.

The Profile of Progress

The progress profile for large migration or product transformation initiatives is never a straight line from start to finish, and planning should not follow a consistent steady-state progression through the lifetime of the project either. This is because customers normally delay making the decision to migrate or change solutions until they absolutely must, typically towards the end of their contract or notice period, and especially if they have negotiated a beneficial commercial deal that cannot be replicated with your new offerings. It can also be the case that there is no compelling reason for a customer to move, so customer incentives need to be built into the project. This is especially important if customers are still in contract close to or beyond the desired completion date of the project.

Having a firm expectation or set of KPIs that show a steady state number of migrations happening per period from the outset is effectively setting yourself up for failure. You should:

• Expect more progress towards the back end of a migration or transformation project and plan accordingly, including properly allocating costs and the resources profiles as needed
• Manage stakeholders’ expectations through regular good governance and reporting to assure that the ‘hockey stick’ profile of progress is expected and normal
• Project managers should not get managed into chasing unrealistic targets or KPIs early in the project timeline. Avoid thinking patterns such as “We are 25% through the timeline of the project, so 25% of the solutions transformations should be complete”. This is unrealistic and the main progress will likely come later.

Commercial Incentivization

Motivating customers to move from one solution to another before they need to (before they are out of contract) can be very difficult. If customer decision-making and approval processes are slow, or they have other, higher priorities than engaging in a transformation project, that will impact the time window for any incentives offered and translate to delays in the overall project timeline.  Additionally, commercial pricing incentives can consume a lot of resources and consideration over several months but have little impact. This can lead to more cost and resource usage than was originally planned for in the project budget. 

Commercial customer incentivization must take into account current pricing plans for individual customers rather than have a generic approach.  If a customer is not paying for a service today or has a heavily discounted plan, then any new incentive to move to a new product early should at least match that model until the end-of-life of current services or end of customer contract date. Otherwise, there is no true incentive to move early.

You should also be aware that getting the necessary internal resources on board to help with transformation programs where customers are involved is a key part of success. That is, account managers and sales resources can view transformation projects as a commercial opportunity for them, but more often than not they tend see them as a distraction from pursuing new sales in different areas. Consideration should also be given to how to incentivize these teams to be fully engaged. This would include establishing a rigorous RACI with account manager and sales support as part of a project initiation and using escalation options if unnecessary delays are being seen in these communication channels.

Migration Tasks and Processes

This is another important area to build into the planning and costings. If third parties or multiple groups, including those that may be located in different parts of the world, are involved, then it’s important find ways to ensure the migration process that is followed is the same for everyone. If the customer has their own third-party provider or IT team that they would like to have involved, those contractors need to follow the same processes to minimize post-upgrade support confusion. A recommendation would be to include a certification type signoff to help govern this.

Ensuring this happens will require an investment of time and effort to make sure the proper installation and upgrade guides and training sessions and workshops can be developed and implemented. Another recommendation would be to provide Q&A sessions and information packs to all customers to ensure they understand the process completely, and provide a checklist to them so they can ensure they have completed every step of any pre-upgrade during the upgrade, and post-upgrade requirements.

Many of these considerations are left out in the initial planning phase.  They are particularly important when it gets to the stage of a service transformation being completed and handed over to support. If problems arise at this stage, it can be difficult to understand if the migration process was followed correctly, which can in turn increase the need for post-upgrade support and investigation into what the root cause is. That means even more time and resources and further delays.