Migrating your services from one provider to the other can be difficult. It requires a lot of planning, careful timing, and knowledge of how these services affect your whole organization. Companies will often stay with one provider due to ease or fear of change and, in the process, inadvertently handcuff themselves to unreasonable prices, terms, and conditions.
Before services get moved, an investment of time and effort is required to define what questions have to be asked and answered. For example:
- What items need to be part of the budget?
- Which are the best service providers, and how do I compare their quotes? (Apples to Apples)
- Is this the time for upgrades?
- What are the Project Goals, and do they align with Company Goals?
- How can I determine Milestones and timeline?
- Who are the stakeholders, and how do I coordinate with the providers?
These questions are just the tip of the iceberg of the considerations needed in migration planning. If all organizational needs are not factored in, the result may be full of mixed outcomes where everything works perfectly for some departments but is a disaster for others.
During the actual migration, there are many strategies that you can use to mitigate the risk of failure. The following are some examples:
- Observe how the service interacts with your entire company. For example, how does internet speed affect each type of employee, guest, consultant or visitor?
- Ensure that the transition process is clean and has room for delays. Consider the most effective cutover strategies. This may include extending your existing service a few days or weeks beyond the start date of your new service or doing a hot cut.
Migrating services to new providers can be incredibly daunting. That is why we’ve put together this post informing you about surface-level issues that many inexperienced implementers miss.
Contact PBC Communications today if you want to learn what goes on under the surface, have questions about the process, or need additional help.
