WHETHER you’re renovating your kitchen, or migrating your IT platform — projects that change your life need planning to succeed, and planning starts with budgeting. If you’ve never created a dream kitchen, how can you know if you can afford your project? Creating new refrigerated spaces that pull out like drawers, or rerouting traffic between sink and stovetop, you need a guide to help get the job done on time and within budget. A guide’s experience saves money, by ensuring you can muster all the resources you'll need & helping you with the tricky bits.

If you are migrating your IT applications, you will face similar challenges to planning your dream kitchen. You will need to set a budget, decide on what goes and what stays, and you will need to decide how much you can do yourself and how much help you need with the tricky business and technical challenges of IT migrations.

What You'll Spend

Making projects work is never without costs, and estimating HP 3000 migration costs involves both high-level planning and detailed study. Once you’re beyond dreaming through kitchen brochures it’s time to enlist the help of an expert. The experience from a migration guide starts you on your path — a trail whose first steps are often taken in front of your company’s executives.

Getting the facts for this kind of executive seminar, — where top managers see confidence in your ability to ensure that the job gets completed on budget and on time — is the least costly step. Expect to spend between $25,000 and $50,000 on this first step, depending on how much pre-briefing your IT staff requires before making presentations to your executives and if you need assistance to deliver the message.

High-Level Plan

At the highest level, your migration plans are a process of discovery. Like planning out a dream kitchen, you get to look at the ways you need to improve your workplace. Innovation before migration can deliver immediate returns on your investment, positive improvements you can carry forward when moving to your ultimate objective. You need to think about how to set up things to accommodate life after migration.

Detailed Plan by Application

Applications represent the appliances in your kitchen. Details in an application plan should include designs for your surround code and surround data. Surround data can be something like extra tables added to your database, for example, to do a process like EDI.

The details of planning for your application and data migration make up the next biggest share of your migration budget. How big? It depends on the number of applications you need to migrate. A small migration’s details can be planned for $30,000-$40,000; a medium-sized, $50,000-$60,000; large, $100,000-$150,000; and the largest of all, $150,000-$250,000.

These costs are what you’ll use to integrate the experience of your guide with your objective. Tools to do the work may represent additional costs, just like purchasing new appliances for a kitchen or renting a table saw. You’ll also want to find out if you need any budget to contract for the migration services your staff won’t be able to perform — because it doesn’t further the learning experience, or there is no time or need to go through this.

Fit into the Big Picture

A successful migration should fit into the bigger picture of a company’s computing strategy. Close study of what sits in your kitchen’s cupboards can reveal items that haven’t been used in years — so you don’t have to make space for them in the new kitchen. With the right planning, applications that aren’t serving the company needs any longer don’t have to be migrated or repurchased.

Once you’ve got a detailed plan, the migration execution — the actual journey, or building your kitchen space — makes up 40 to 60 percent of your total costs to migrate. If you’re expecting a small migration project, spending $40,000 on an executive seminar and detailed planning may then bring in the whole project at $100,000, plus the costs of your tools.

Plans Need Blueprints

Good execution should include also data blueprinting, like measuring your available kitchen area. No matter whether your applications will be migrated or replaced, your data is making the journey — just like your pots, pans and dishes will still be used in a new kitchen.

What’s in a data blueprint? It’s a complete inventory of what’s on your HP 3000, and can include file formats file types, database designs, sources of metadata and the number of volumes and storage needs. A blueprint examines how useful your data really is - so you can see why you’re storing old data.

At MB Foster, we’re data access and delivery specialists, so we can ensure data relationships and the data itself isn’t lost during your renovation or journey to another platform. We help develop the data architecture for existing and target repositories, as well as logical and physical architectures. A blueprint also identifies data constraints & relationships between your data.

Training

Once the transition is complete you will need to be in a position to function in the new kitchen; the new skills in operations, programming and even end user deployment will need timely and comprehensive training. Budgeting and planning for the training will be a critical success factor.

Managing a Project

Just like the Y2K efforts that we all tackled a few years ago, migration is a project that demands management and planning. There are so many aspects to consider, from the steps onto new operational trails in IT to the new application skills to be taught to end users. Start by analyzing your budget with the help of a guide. Everyone needs to plan their finances for projects, so they can determine what resources will be required to purchase the desired appliances and light fixtures — or the applications and services required to make their migration a success.

About MB Foster

MB Foster has the people who understand how to deliver applications and data that match your business needs. For more than thirty years we have been the trusted advisor to global customers ranging from local government to Global 100 enterprises. Our personalized service has proven time and again that we listen to your business needs, and then find the right service strategy to provide solutions that solve your business and information technology challenges today and into the future.

Whether it is a software product, migration project, data services, or project management, we make it easy for you to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. We work with our customers to streamline their IT business operations to reduce costs, improve delivery, and grow revenues. Learn more at www.mbfoster.com.