Available on Kindle
This primer is aimed at project managers new to data center migrations and organized for quick consumption.
What is the purpose of a checklist?
A checklist helps guide the practitioner through a series of tasks to complete. A good checklist needs to be precise, brief, and actionable. The most cited checklist example is the pre-flight check done by every airline pilot before takeoff. To use the checklist effectively, pilots will have already been trained in the complexities of their aircraft and the principles of flying.
Information technology is a bit different in that training and experience vary widely. And individuals find themselves in situations every day in which they are neither trained nor familiar with the task they’ve been charged to complete. Online searches often substitute for experience, and recipes found online are thrown like darts at the computer to solve complex problems.
This checklist was developed to guide the project manager through a data center migration. It’s important to realize that this checklist—precise, brief, and actionable—is the WHAT to do and not the HOW to do it. If you find yourself unfamiliar with the HOW, especially if this is your first data center move, that’s a signal to stop and seek more information prior to proceeding.
Would you want inexperienced pilots going through their pre-flight checklists to roll the dice and proceed with takeoff?
Or would you prefer them to be trained, practiced, and knowledgeable?
This checklist primer is organized as follows:
- Pre-Move and Budget
- Governance
- Data Center Migration Playbook
- Rehearsal
- Move Events
- Post-Move Considerations
What’s not in this guide?
Let me remind you that you won’t find full-blown work breakdown schedules, Microsoft Project Plan templates, data center move budget spreadsheets, or any type of boilerplate to copy and modify. Why? I’ve been involved in many data center migrations and can tell you that success springs first from you.
Get the data center migration checklist today.