Migration assurance
Independent, continuous evidence that the migration is under control. Not a report written the week before go-live.
What assurance is, and is not
Reconciliation proves what happened to the data. Assurance is the layer above it: the controls that keep the whole migration honest while it happens, so the steering committee’s green status is made of evidence rather than optimism.
We repeatedly see programmes where the load statistics are excellent and the migration is failing: unowned exceptions accumulating, mapping decisions unmade, cleansing effort unsized. Assurance exists to surface exactly that gap, early enough to act on it. A successful load tells you the tooling worked. Assurance tells you whether the business will receive its data.
The controls
- Cycle gates
- Each mock conversion has entry and exit criteria. A cycle that misses its exit criteria repeats. Quality debt does not roll silently forward into cutover.
- Data quality gates
- Business-defined rules run against every cycle's data, and the trend is visible. The go-live inherits measured data, not assumed data.
- Reconciliation evidence
- Every cycle produces the evidence pack described under reconciliation: totals, values, relationships, exceptions, in a form the business signs.
- Exception discipline
- Open exceptions are counted, owned and aged. An exception without an owner is a cutover risk with a start date.
- Decision log
- Mapping and survivorship decisions are recorded with their owner and rationale. Nobody re-litigates a decision at 02:00 on cutover weekend.
- Programme visibility
- Planned versus actual across streams, including data and testing, visible to the people accountable. We have engineered PMO analytics for complex ERP programmes from Microsoft Project data for exactly this purpose.
When to start
Assurance is cheapest at the start and most expensive as a rescue. Started with the programme, it is a set of habits: gates, evidence, ownership. Started after the second slipped cutover date, it is surgery. We provide it both ways, and we would rather be your habit than your surgeon.
It also does not need to be Ixia running your migration. Assurance works as an independent layer over any delivery partner’s work, which is precisely when independence is most valuable.