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Id immediately set the expectation that the process will be messy, take longer than expected, and require continued maintenance, iterations, and process improve

Id immediately set the expectation that the process will be messy, take longer than expected, and require continued maintenance, iterations, and process improvements. Management usually tries to sell a transition as being great for everyone and will solve all problems. When it usually ends up being awful, painful, and take incredible effort. Disappointment is always better the sooner it is communicated. Align in principal for why an effort must happen and the realistic benefits to their daily life. Don't sell them a fairytale. I've found every transition is nost painful because expectations and communication is poorly managed. I don't blame people. Usually the offenders are in a culture where telling the truth is unpopular. It just depends on if you want to have a successful transition, or make people feel good about a project that takes 6 years to not finish.

Nathanba 2y ago
I would strongly disagree with that, do not go into a migration with the expectation that you'll impact people. If you do that, you'll take shortcuts, you'll start thinking in the wrong ways. Suddenly you'll start saying to yourself that the migrated customers should be able to live with X or Y or that your colleagues have to accept that they have to do these various steps because hey, we are doing a migration after all. Instead it has to retain the exact same behavior at all times. It should cause zero pain whatsoever, if it causes pain you failed at your migration task. Secondly I agree with the other poster that it has to be incremental, otherwise you might as well accept a monumental amount of bugs from the start. My third point is that you should automate as much as possible and write code to do the migration in a repeatable way, first on testdata, and then keep expanding the type of testdata until it encompasses all the possible data that customers can have. Then you run that migration on the press of a button and it should work perfectly every single time you do it.

Nathanba 2y ago

I would strongly disagree with that, do not go into a migration with the expectation that you'll impact people. If you do that, you'll take shortcuts, you'll start thinking in the wrong ways. Suddenly you'll start saying to yourself that the migrated customers should be able to live with X or Y or that your colleagues have to accept that they have to do these various steps because hey, we are doing a migration after all. Instead it has to retain the exact same behavior at all times. It should cause zero pain whatsoever, if it causes pain you failed at your migration task. Secondly I agree with the other poster that it has to be incremental, otherwise you might as well accept a monumental amount of bugs from the start. My third point is that you should automate as much as possible and write code to do the migration in a repeatable way, first on testdata, and then keep expanding the type of testdata until it encompasses all the possible data that customers can have. Then you run that migration on the press of a button and it should work perfectly every single time you do it.