Common Undermining Move Factors with Data Center Relocations

While every data center move has unique challenges at every phase, some common factors are at work undermining the move’s success. Awareness and action can mean the difference in the success or failure of your move. Let’s explore a few of them.

1. No Common Sense of Urgency (or No Urgency at all !)
2. The Accelerating Schedule Effect
3. Underestimating Coordination Issues
4. Failure to Contractually Obligate Vendors
5. Failure to Focus on equally critical post-move issues
6. Constructing a Plan where EVERYTHING has to go right

No Common Sense of Urgency (or No Urgency at all !)

A sense of urgency is essential in an organization that is preparing for a major move. Often you will find that there is no shared sense of urgency or worse…no urgency at all. Without this sense of urgency, decisions are deferred, in-fighting is allowed to continue, and priorities are not properly set to make the move successful.

The Accelerating Schedule Effect

An interesting thing happens the closer you get to your move date. The schedule appears to accelerate towards your milestones. In other words, the closer you get…the less hours in the day you have and fewer resources are available. When you review your schedule, pay particular attention to those final months with an eye toward building contingency buffers and resource alternatives.

Underestimating Coordination Issues

While the technical challenges are not small, neither is the coordination required across your organization. Plan for the coordination required with your customers, your vendors, your internal staff, your executive team, and your end-users. You wouldn’t be the first organization that failed to coordinate with their finance staff and missed payroll, vendor payments, and customer invoices due to an ill-timed move.

Failure to Contractually Obligate Vendors

Simply, if you need a vendor to perform a move-related service (like moving your Storage Area Network), then don’t leave that to a handshake. Get a statement of work that outlines the schedule and deliverables so that your key Vendors are Contractually on-board.

Failure to Focus on equally critical post-move issues

These can be different for each organization, but post-move employee retention and de-commissioning of unneeded services are two that rise to the top of most post-relocation plans.

Constructing a Plan where EVERYTHING has to go right

Virtually all move project plans suffer from this mistake. Review your plan with a qualified professional to ensure that key risk areas and contingencies are addressed.

Additional Resources

• What Every Executive should know about their data center relocation
• What are four reasons not to move your data center?
• Where do you find the elusive data center move checklist?
• How do you calculate moving expenses for data center relocations?
• How do you write a data center relocation statement of work (SOW)?

E-Oasis can plan your data center move. Use the contact information to your right to get started.