Minimizing ambiguity in custom scope migrations

Introduction

Cloud migration is a transformative journey that unlocks new opportunities for businesses. However, this transition can be overwhelming, and it necessitates a phased approach that utilizes different migration strategies. Initially, applications that require minimal changes are migrated using lift and shift strategy. More complex monolithic applications, that require re-architecting or refactoring to leverage cloud-native capabilities, are taken up in later phases. There are complex migrations that implement new business rules, change user journeys, and replace architecture components require significant application development beyond typical cloud engineering tasks. This type of migrations are called custom scope migrations.

A solely technology-centric approach to custom scope migrations results in ambiguity regarding business outcomes. For custom scope migrations achieve the intended objectives, it is crucial to meticulously define the custom scope. This post is aimed at those who are leading these migration programs. As a migration lead, you should undertake additional planning measures outlined in this post to capture custom scope. This proactive approach establishes a clear correlation between your migration activities and desired business outcomes.

Reasons for ambiguity regarding custom scope

Cloud migration projects are typically led by technology teams that focus on transitioning technology platforms and operational procedures to leverage cloud capabilities. While targeted business outcomes outline overall business goals, it may not delve into the intended outcomes for each application. Migrating to the cloud can significantly impact how end-users interact with applications, and cloud-native capabilities may fundamentally change user experience. Application product owners and business analysts possess valuable insights into business functionality and user experience, yet they are often left out of migration planning sessions.

A migration team without business analysts, lacks the knowledge to document the intended business functionality, due to missing documentation required to educate the migration team about application functionality. As a result, business rules that significantly impact migration timelines, are rarely documented. Without extensive involvement of application subject-matter experts, or adequate documentation, migration teams that are external to the application have limited information on application functionality. Consequently, such applications enter the migration pipeline without a well-defined scope, leading to a misalignment between migration efforts and intended business outcomes.

Impact of ambiguity

Failing to thoroughly discuss, and unambiguously document application-specific outcomes, leads to architecture designs and implementations that fall short of meeting the intended goals. Architectural changes or complete rewrites of the business rules would be necessary to meet requirements revealed in later stages of the migration cycle. Ambiguity about the scope also results in underestimation of effort, causing severe delays, budget overruns, and burnout among engineering teams due to prolonged migration timelines. As a migration lead, you must clearly identify application-specific outcomes from the outset to mitigate these pitfalls.

Addressing custom scope

To address this issue, you should embark on the process of clarifying business outcomes during the pre-sales cycle. During the assess phase, working closely with your project sponsors, you must clearly identify applications with custom scope. During the mobilization phase, the portfolio assessment team should quantify custom scope and assign the application to the appropriate migration waves that include design and measure activities for custom scope. You should utilize the interval between mobilization and migration wave to build readiness by preparing documentation for business rules, user journeys, and any other artifacts that will guide the migration team. At the beginning of the Migrate & Modernize phase, you will organize workshops to identify and document the custom scope. You can use a well-known hierarchy of Critical Success Factors (CSFs), Success Criteria, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to capture business outcomes.

The diagram below articulates handling of custom scope throughout the migration journey:

Figure 1. Additional steps to quantify the custom scope, build readiness for migration, and demonstrate achievement of success criteria using CSFs and KPIs for a custom scope migration.

This framework informs architectural requirements, and allows you to measure project outcomes once the application is live in production. Normally, only a small fraction of the customer team will interact with your team during migration. A significant benefit of this exercise is that you will provide your application owner a metric that they can use to keep their extended group of both business and technical stakeholders aligned.

Approach to defining success criteria

To further address custom scope migrations effectively, you should start by examining the customer business objectives for the migration, as set by the steering committee. While these business objectives define the desired end state, it is crucial for you to outline how each application will contribute to achieving these objectives. To capture these details, you will host a series of design sessions with the application team, represented by product owners, business analysts, architects, and technical leads, to document the future state of the application.

In these collaborative sessions, you will facilitate discussions to elaborate the outcomes of custom scope migrations by identifying Critical Success Factors (CSFs) first. This iterative process allows the migration to align with the overarching customer business objectives while accounting for the unique requirements and implications for each application.

Critical Success Factors (CSFs)

CSFs are the key elements that will contribute to applications delivering their intended outcomes when running in the cloud environment. These factors can be related to both business outcomes and technical capabilities for the migrated applications meet the desired business objectives and leverage the full potential of cloud-based technology.

• Business outcomes: Business CSFs represent the desired outcomes that business owners of applications aim to achieve through the migration process. Examples of such business CSFs include:
  • Enhancing customer experience through improved application design and functionality.
  • Enabling new or improved product offerings leveraging cloud capabilities.
  • Realizing staff productivity gains through streamlined processes and optimized workflows.
  • Meeting regulatory compliance requirements by adhering to industry standards and best practices.
  • Complete the migration project on-time and within the allocated budget.
• Technical outcomes: Technical CSFs represent the outcomes that the technology owner intends to achieve through the migration process. These capabilities align with the overall cloud migration strategy and are addressed during well-architected reviews. However, for large and complex applications, many of these factors deviate at the application level. Typically, application owners do not have direct communication with the cloud engineering and are unaware of new guardrails. You should inform your application owners about the organization-level migration CSFs and validate that they can operate within those guardrails. By having this conversation, you perform a good fail-safe check to validate that the application does not encounter technical or operational issues immediately after migration. Examples of technical CSFs include:
  • Attaining Operational Excellence through streamlined processes and optimized workflows.
  • Improved Security and Incident Response capabilities leveraging cloud-native features.
  • Enhancing Reliability and Accountability through robust monitoring and governance mechanisms.
  • Increased Performance by leveraging the scalability and elasticity of cloud infrastructure.
  • Achieving Cost Efficiency through optimized resource utilization and consumption-based pricing models.
  • Meeting Sustainability Goals by leveraging energy-efficient and environmentally responsible cloud services.

Success Criteria and KPIs

Each CSF helps business owners achieve various success criteria. These success criteria are used to prove that the intended outcomes have been achieved by business owners. You can use these success criteria to provide direction to the migration team. Success criteria are measured using KPIs. You can build reporting mechanisms into application infrastructure to measure KPIs. You can report progress and outcomes to your project sponsors using these success criteria and KPIs. Each application will have its unique set of criteria and KPIs. You can use the following reference list to develop questionnaires for your application owners, to gain comprehensive understanding of the desired outcomes and methods of measurement.

• Business Outcomes:
  • Designing for customer experience
    • Centralized Customer Identity: Achieve X% consolidation of unique customer records across databases, customers do not receive duplicate emails or text messages for the same issues.
    • Addition of new customer segments: Support new regions, and activate self-service features with low fees to cater to income segments with an average income below $50K.
    • Improved customer experience: Reduce order completion time by 1 minute by modifying the order funnel process.
    • Improved speed of interaction: Reduce average page load time by XX seconds.
    • New channels of communication: Introduce social media channels for customer engagement.
    • Real-time data: Data is ready for user consumption within XX minutes from receipt in inbound queues.
    • Historical data and analytics: Provide product owners and business analysts with access to historical data and analytics, enabling average query results to be returned within XX minutes for XM number of rows.
  • Products and Services
    • New products added to the product family: XX number of new products operational, changed by the capabilities of cloud services utilized.
    • New capabilities added to existing products: XX applications are voice-enabled using Lex workflow, enhancing user experience through cloud-based natural language processing.
    • Enhanced ways of using products: XX interactions automated using AI, streamlining user journeys by eliminating redundant steps.
    • Self-service options: XX product offerings now include self-service workflows, empowering users with greater control and convenience.
    • Extended existing features: XX GB of additional storage added per user, and XX GB increase in maximum file size, facilitating seamless data management and collaboration.
  • Business operations
    • New capabilities for employees: Introduce voice and text-based interfaces, enabling more efficient and convenient ways of working.
    • AI Companion for employees: Leverage cloud-based artificial intelligence to provide employees with intelligent virtual assistants, streamlining tasks, and improving productivity.
    • Increase workflow automation for employees: Automate recurring workflows and processes, reducing manual effort and minimizing errors.
    • Improve data analytics for product owners: Provide XX new dashboards and integrate new data sources, empowering product owners with comprehensive and actionable insights.
  • Regulatory
    • Regulatory compliance: Adhere to regulatory requirements by leveraging cloud services with data centers located in approved regions, and implement robust reporting and auditing mechanisms.
    • Data retention and disposal: Establish and enforce data retention policies, timely disposal of obsolete data in compliance with relevant regulations.
    • Data security and customer privacy: Implement strong data security measures and safeguards to protect sensitive information and maintain customer privacy, in line with industry standards and best practices.
  • Migration
    • Migration duration and budget: Complete the migration within the planned timeline and allocated budget, minimizing disruptions and improving resource utilization.
    • Application uptime during migration: Maintain acceptable application uptime and availability during the migration process, minimizing impact on end-users and business operations.
    • Migration of users to the new platform: Seamlessly transition end-users to the new cloud-based platform with minimal disruption and providing comprehensive training and support as needed.
• Technology Outcomes:
  • Operational excellence
    • Technical skills needed to operate in the cloud: Identify and address skill gaps by hiring XX new professionals with relevant cloud expertise, and providing XX training and certification opportunities to upskill existing staff.
    • Governance model for the target state: Implement a comprehensive governance model that defines roles, responsibilities, and processes for managing cloud resources, enforcing compliance, and maintaining operational efficiency in the cloud environment.
  • Security
    • Identity and Access Management: Implement multifactor authentication (MFA) for users and secure application credentials, enforcing strong access controls and protection against unauthorized access.
    • Data Security and compliance: Implement appropriate data security measures, such as encryption, access controls, and auditing, to safeguard sensitive data and comply with relevant regulations.
    • Compliance requirements, certifications, and attestations: Obtain necessary compliance certifications and attestations for the cloud environment, demonstrating adherence to industry standards and regulatory requirements.
  • Reliability
    • Data Integrity: Maintain XX% of complete records, enforcing the accuracy and completeness of data throughout the migration and cloud operations.
    • Stability: Leverage cloud-native automation capabilities, with XX% of services using Automated Deployment and XX% of services with auto-recovery features, minimizing manual intervention and improving system resilience.
    • Application Availability (Uptime): Achieve XX.XX% uptime, with XX% reduction in maintenance windows, and implement robust disaster recovery capabilities with Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of XX hours and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of XX hours, facilitating continuous application availability and minimizing data loss.
  • Performance efficiency
    • Architecture pattern: Adopt a XX% serverless architecture, leveraging cloud-native capabilities for improved scalability, cost-efficiency, and reduced operational overhead.
    • Hardware selection: Reduce XX% of CPU usage by utilizing more efficient processors, optimizing resource utilization and associated costs.
    • Data latency and throughput: Support XX number of simultaneous users and accommodate a maximum of XXX users, allowing reliable and responsive data access and processing.
    • Network Topology/Bandwidth: Maintain an average network speed of XX Mbps, allowing efficient data transfer and minimizing latency for critical applications and services.
  • Cost optimization
    • Cost-effective resources: Achieve % reduction in compute costs by utilizing more efficient processors, optimizing resource utilization and associated expenditures.
    • Migration Acceleration Programs: Leverage cloud provider’s migration acceleration programs to keep the overall cost of the migration program under $XX, allowing a cost-effective transition to the cloud environment.
  • Sustainability
    • Resource consumption: Achieve XX kWh of energy use per 1,000 customers, optimizing resource utilization and minimizing environmental impact.
    • % use of renewable energy: Leverage cloud providers that utilize % of renewable energy sources for their data centers, contributing to sustainable operations.
    • Staff productivity: Improve staff productivity by reducing customer call duration from XX to X minutes, enabling more efficient customer service and support.

While the specific set of success criteria and KPIs will vary for each application, these factors ultimately dictate and shape the migration plan. Identifying and aligning to the desired outcomes early in the process is crucial for you to deliver the intended business and technical objectives.

Using Success Criteria and KPIs to measure outcomes

You, as a migration lead, leverages Success Criteria and KPIs to align stakeholders. Before proceeding to the design stage, it is crucial for you to address any conflicts or differences in understanding. Application owners bear the responsibility to make certain that the extended user group is in agreement about the migration outcomes. You should seek a formal sign-off from the application owner to secure this commitment and avoid scope ambiguity. The formal signed-off document empowers Customer Product Owners to create Epics and User Stories that will eventually meet the success criteria and measure KPIs.

Knowing the goals ahead of time allows your project team to build a reporting framework and set up KPI reporting when the application goes live in the cloud. Clear alignment on Success Criteria and KPIs from the outset facilitates a smooth migration that delivers the intended outcomes.

Conclusion

To articulate, communicate, and manage the custom scope effectively, a hierarchy of CSFs, Success Criteria, and KPIs should be employed. This post explained additional steps for you as a migration lead to define and manage the custom scope during the cloud migration process. You can use the step-by-step process and pertinent examples provided in this post, to conduct workshops for establishing a well-defined custom scope, mitigating risks and migrating custom scope applications to the cloud.