KEY TAKEAWAYS

Learn about the pitfalls hindering data migration projects

Which data migration approach works best for your project

Know more about Celfocus Delivery Process for Migration

WHO SHOULD READ THIS DOCUMENT

CTO

Project Managers

Migration experts

Celfocus Data Migration ApproachThe elephant in the room

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Business in general and Communication Service Providers (CSPs) in particular spend millions in acquiring and parameterizing new systems. Data migration of those systems, on the other hand is normally considered just another project deliverable, with low budget allocation and fewer resources focused on designing, testing and executing the migration process. This mindset may explain why, according to Gartner and the Standish Group, “67% of all data migration projects cause implementation delays, large overruns, or fail outright”.

Another important aspect when it comes to data migration is the tendency to underestimate its complexity. At its most basic understanding, data migration is about shifting data from one place to another. The reality is quite different!

Data migration is a critical process in any IT project. It is normally the final stage and a milestone that can determine the project’s success or failure. In a greenfield scenario, or when deploying a new system with very few integration points, data migration is important but not a critical success factor. In all other scenarios, it is exactly the opposite.

Data migration, in this scenario, is pivotal to ensure business stability but also an opportunity to review inaccuracies, unknowns, redundant and duplicate data. Furthermore, that source data may be perfectly adequate for its current use; it may be wholly inadequate, in terms of content and structure, for the objectives of the new target system.

Mission critical systems, such as CRM or Billing, have their own data models and associated business logic. The new deployment of any of these systems has a deep impact on the overall IT architecture but also on operations and customer care.

Choosing the new platform seems to be a strategic decision, much more critical than ensuring that the data that populates it is fit for the purpose. The result? Business disruption and similar data issues as in the, just decommissioned, legacy systems.

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Migration Strategies

Determining the strategy that best suits the objective before initiating any migration process is a must. Organizations have different options to move forward, depending on the project scope, risk and setting. However, for the most part they can classified in one of the following strategies:

Based on Celfocus’ experience, the decision of which data migration strategy to choose (Big-bang vs Phased) should be purely based on business risk management and not on what the solution is or is not able to accomplish. The technical solution must not restrict the strategic freedom to decide. This implies that the solution must always be designed to migrate 100% of the customers in a short time-frame, regardless of the phasing strategy chosen for go-live.

Why is data migration becoming more complex?

Business growth and IT complexity, mixed with an expanding landscape of legacy systems, have led to a significant increase of data and the need to ensure it is well processed and stored. Data volume and diversity creates an opportunity but also a threat as it may hinder CSPs’ ability to extract value due to data quality issues and congruity.

Data Migration pitfalls to avoid

Based on Celfocus’ experience in performing data migration and systems decommission in very large projects, within the telco world, a set of best practices have been identified in order to reduce risk and ensure a successful migration, among them:

• Involve business users

• Establish a strong Data Governance structure

• Assess legacy systems data quality

• Define a migration validation and test process

BIG-BANG APPROACH

It normally includes concluding the entire migration in a small period window, where data is extracted from the source systems and loaded to the target systems, followed by switching all processing to the new environment.

PHASED APPROACH

Takes an incremental approach to migrating data. In this scenario, both the new and old systems run in parallel and data is migrated over time.

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Common arguments against this approach are related to the risk of business disruption/outage, bad customer experience during the stabilization period, training and learning curve for users, and problem solving if something goes wrong.

These challenges can be downplayed by:

Big-Bang Approach

A Big-Bang migration is usually associated with a highly disruptive process where the full business is migrated to a new stack over a very brief period (e.g. one weekend).

Disruption as a business

change driver

System users tend to stay within the boundaries of what they know and are used to, rather than face new challenges. Phased strategies (especially greenfield) create the perfect excuse for users to stay away from the new system.

During the project, there is far less pressure for user adoption, ownership, commitment and training since the system will only affect a small percentage of customers. After the go-live, it also gives users a lot more time to be finicky about what they dislike on the new system, spreading a negative feeling thus inhibiting new customers from being migrated.

Alternatively, by committing to a firm date where customers from a specific segment are migrated, creates drive around the final objective, avoids time wasting with intermediate throwaway solutions and forces everyone to work harder and towards the same goal. Focus will be on making sure the new system works, instead of focusing on why they don’t like it.

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Planning and testing are key here. Proper planning of integrated testing include channels, real test-cases with real users, special focus on preparing customer facing users, designing solutions that are easy for dealers to use and understand, on-site support for shops provided by expert users and technical staff, and alternative processes and backup plans for failure scenarios.

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Creating support processes

aligned with the new system

Risk of system failure / outage

It is a common error in migration projects not to align the new platforms support and operations with the way they are supposed to be utilized.

It is fundamental that new systems (especially integrated systems that replace multiple platforms) have their support and operation processes revised to match the needs generated by the new platform.

It is undeniable that there is risk associated to going live with a new system. However, a number of strategies can and should be followed to minimize this risk, among them:

• Extend the testing periods with full data for longer periods of time.

• Proper load and performance testing with full data, making sure test case coverage is higher than usual, guaranteeing business engagement for testing.

• Perform a friendly customer trial (internal users…), having the new system work as a shadow of the production one.

• Rollback plan that will be valid for a few days in case things go wrong.

The cost of all these measures, even when they are all put into place, is far less than the mandatory measures required for an extended phased migration and they all contribute for a system with better adoption levels and better performance.

Customer experience is the result of many factors, one of them being IT system performance and reliability. After a major release on new systems, it is likely that some areas will be affected by glitches in the platform or by users’ lack of knowledge. Some of the most common problems occur in channels (self-care, IVR...) or shops where agents sit directly in front of customers.

Bad customer experience

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Phased MigrationChallenges

The main benefit of a phased approach for data migration is that it is easier to control the impacts for business adoption including:

• Learning curve

• Number of people to be trained, dealer network training.

• Impacts on customers (mainly on channels and invoices).

• Less of a perceived risk for the overall business (if something fails, customers are not affected all at once).

However...

Some migration scenarios (based on tariff or customer type) may require a backward migration. This situation should be avoided, as much as possible, considering some of the products, services or features available on the new platform may not be available on the legacy. Therefore, causing potential information loss and bad customer experience.

When a large IT project is carried-out, it is very likely that the capabilities, processes, products and features available on the old system are not an exact match to the capabilities available on the new system. This is probably the reason why a new system was required in the first place.

By supporting the same customer segments in two different platforms, the products, services and customer experience they have, will be limited to which system they are presently supported by. (This needs to be factored in when designing the migration strategy.)

Backwards migration

Different capabilities

...a phased approach for data migration from legacy systems to a new IT stack will unavoidably create some problems of its own:

System switching also affects reporting systems, data warehouse, commissions and finance applications.

A working model (preferably the new one) needs to be selected and developed together with the customer’s data migration while remaining backwards compatible with the legacy.

Reporting and finance

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Channel switching

Freeze Period

Double development

and maintenance

Non-assisted channels (i.e., IVR, Self-Care, USSD, Partners Portals...) that depend on a pre-existing service infrastructure will have to be redesigned to perform automatic switching between the new and legacy infrastructures.

The longer the migration, the more robust the switching capabilities needs to be (and more expensive as well).

Staggered migration of customers for a long period, especially when this is not coupled with logically consistent segments being migrated (i.e., all prepaid customers), means that new business processes adoption will be staggered as well.

Users will have to use the legacy or the new system depending on the customer being migrated or not, but will also have, in many cases, to treat customers differently since systems’ capabilities (products & services, processes, etc.) will very likely differ.

This is especially sensitive for dealers, that sit outside the organization and are unlikely to use two different systems depending on the customer being migrated or not.

A phased migration imposes very strict limits to what can be done to the legacy and new systems, during the migration period. Changes affecting the migration process, such as new products and services or new features, should not be allowed; otherwise, the migration process will need adjustments and new trials. This carries significant risk and cost and must be part of the strategy for a successful phased migration.

During long phased migrations, but especially greenfield transformation projects where requirement freezing is no longer an option, double development becomes the main issue. There are two main aspects to consider:

1. 2.Every requirement that affects customers present in both legacy and new stacks needs to be developed in parallel and most likely deployed in parallel. This is difficult, inefficient and costly.

Since the systems do not have the same capabilities, new requirements need to be written targeting one of them. This will most likely result in heavy customization, restricted product capabilities, longer time-to-market and more than double the cost.

The challenge of having two different working models being supported by internal systems for a period of time is significant and needs to be factored in as an additional cost and risk for a phased migration strategy.

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Celfocus Delivery Process for Migration

Celfocus allies market best practices regarding agile analysis and development methodologies, with a proven framework for data migration implementations.

We have also developed a set of assets that act as accelerators and ensure the overall quality of migrated data.

This chapter covers Celfocus’ approach to data migration. It presents our delivery process and technical framework.

Several key factors determine the success of a data migration project, including:

To deliver a successful data migration project, Celfocus has developed a 3-step delivery process. The first stage comprises the entire solution strategy, followed by the analysis/development/test phases using a multi-spring agile methodology (including several sprints) and the final deployment phase.

ANALYSIS

A deep analysis on the source systems and data ensures the correct mapping of all issues impacting the new system once it goes into production.

TESTING

To ensure the integrity and quality of migrated data in production, it is paramount to define and execute a testing strategy. By testing the applications with migrated data, it is be possible to assure the correct system behaviour after go-live.

STRATEGY

A cohesive strategy, adapted to the project

context and needs is vital for the implementation

success.

Data migration is a critical success factor in any project, regardless of size or complexity. Celfocus has a strong success record in migrating massive volumes of data in the most heterogeneous environments.

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Celfocus delivery process

Project management’ good practices state that all deliverables must be reviewed, approved and signed off before moving on to the next phase.

A key success factor in any data migration implementation is how the entire project is organised. Over the years, Celfocus defined a delivery framework that covers all project implementation phases:

SETUP - In this phase, the strategy blueprint is defined. The environments to be used are also established, as well as the communication plan regarding team interaction.

IMPLEMENTATION - This is the agile phase of the process, comprising Analysis, Developments and Tests (Dry Runs). To speed up testing, this phase should be planned in several waves. Data is organized in entities, each having its own flow. To test the data migration process, two different methods are used:

• Dry Runs Where the data migration process is either executed and validated internally or delivered to subsequent acceptance environments;

• Parallel Runs (only used in Billing migrations).

DEPLOYMENT - The solution established in the setup phase, which has been analysed and developed during the implementation phase, is now executed in the production environment.

Nonetheless, this is still a common error in data migration projects: deliverables are not approved and the scope is not frozen, leading to an endless implementation and a solution that cannot be tested by Quality Assurance teams.

Define the Data Migration strategyand the deployment approach. Prepare project environments and create the project communication strategy

Analyse all the source systems, and define the data mapping rules. Implement the data migration solution and test it. Perform Dry-Runs and Parallel Runs (billing migrations)

Beginning of the project.First month

During project Analysis/Development/Tests phases After/During Deployment

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Execute the data migration solution in production environment, using the approach defined in the set-up phase.

• Data Migration Strategy Document

• Deployment Approach

• Environments Strategy

• Data Quality process definition

• Data Migration Design Document

• Data Field Mapping

• Data Migration Solution implementation

• Dry Runs reports

• List of data issues and data quality

• Data Migration Plan

• Production execution report

• List of data issues and data quality

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Following Celfocus’ delivery process, including respecting the phase flow and using an agile methodology for development and test, several benefits are attained:

Data Migration Technical

Framework

In a data migration project there is also the need to establish a technical framework, together with the delivery process. Celfocus’ Data Migration Technical Framework aims to ensure an end-to-end solution for data migration implementations, where the building blocks are chosen according to the project needs. It includes specific tools that act as accelerators and ensure a successful data migration.

The framework covers the entire data migration process, from extraction to load, and can be applied to either big bang or phased approaches.

• Partitioning the scope into entities enables performing the analysis in a more focused and direct way. Relevant information for a given logical entity is condensed in one place;

• It facilitates the data migration analysis/design approval by the business areas. Even if a specific entity design is not approved, other approved entities allow to continue. The overall data migration process is not jeopardised;

• Enables parallel analysis, design and implementation;

• Due to its modular implementation, it is possible to release functionality sooner to QA teams;

• Code issues are easier to correct since it is already partitioned;

• Increase the overall quality of migrated data due to extensive testing.

Product Mapping Converter Migration Express Reconciliation Express

Pre Migration

Select Freeze Extract Egibility /Validations

Transformation Load Publish

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Reconciliation

Unfreeze

ETLPhases

ProcessPhases

MigrationSolutionModules

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This document presented different migration approaches and shared Celfocus’ vision, frameworks and tools to accomplish this, so many times, undervalued but critical stage, in any project.

These assets target specific phases in the project implementation process and deployment, acting as accelerators, minimizing risk and maximizing the overall project timeframe. Celfocus’ key assets include:

PRODUCT MAPPING CONVERTER - This asset automates product and respective customer associations, across all systems included in the migration process.

• Problem it addresses: Map products across systems

• Scope: Transformation phase

• Benefits: Speed up and ensure the correct product mapping across the different systems. The asset uses reference data, less prone to human errors thus mitigating risk.

MIGRATION EXPRESS - Created primarily to solve performance issues of load tools that are able to target any system.

• Problem it addresses: Data load performance limitations

• Functional scope: Load phase

• Benefits: Automates several tasks and optimizes the entire process. Reference data based (i.e., configuration only), generating data quality benefits. Accelerates the development and testing phases.

RECONCILIATION EXPRESS - The need for an automated solution that is able to ensure the entire data migration process and help on the reporting was the genesis for this asset’s development.

• Problem it addresses: The need to have an automated assurance process to audit and report the data migration process

• Functional scope: Transversal to all data migration phases

• Benefits: Automates data migration reporting and ensures the quality of the process.

Regardless of the size or complexity, the replacement of a legacy system necessarily encloses a data migration project.

If you wish to know more about how Celfocus can help your organization, please contact us using info@celfocus.com.

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Celfocus is a fast growing, global high-tech company with a reputation for developing and implementing successful projects and solutions that drive business value for the telecommunications industry.

By combining a deep business knowledge with the understanding of different technologies, while never losing sight of the customer experience, Celfocus built a reputation leveraged on an unexcelled track record.

Serving Clients in 25+ countries, Celfocus helps organizations transform their business in order to improve competitive positioning and ultimately their performance.

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