Migration Summary

Over the last couple of weeks I have put together some of my key learning’s from the last nine month, leading the architecture team on a migration project. There were a lot of firsts in this project for me, both from the problem space of the project but also leading a relatively large architecture team. This has been a good change to reflect on the project and take some time to capture these learnings.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
Confucius

Leading a team of architects presented several challenges one simple problem of having multiple architects but one architecture to document. A simple habit that the team got into which helped develop a culture of knowledge sharing was the Architecture Review Meeting. At the core of the whole project we developing a Reference Architecture to tie everything back to. Last but not least, we used a technique from the agile world called the retrospective to provide a bit of continuous improvement as we moved from one part of the project to the next.

Doing a migration project was challenging, from the start is seemed that migration is just ETL. As the project evolved we soon realised that a migration is much more than ETL. We had to tackle several problems such as migrating a large volume of data. The importance but also the frustration of having to define what would happen on the day. By looking at other migration projects we came across a technique of defaulting rather than exception.

What a journey!

Tags: Best Practice, Leadership, Migration