Migration Sign-off: Sign-off Development

Sign-off development will begin during migration preparation. This will involve interviewing the Data Owners to confirm their requirements.

Interview Preparation

After a Planning Template has first been added to a Project, a Snapshot is automatically created.

This can be downloaded as a document and shared before a meeting, to support the Data Owner interview.

The top-level area in a template will be based on the project decomposition from migration preparation. An individual Data Owner may be responsible for one or more of these areas.

Before the snapshot is downloaded, a system supplier may deselect areas of functionality not purchased by the customer.

A new snapshot can then be saved before it is downloaded.

Finally, the test state of each area should be set to ‘Not Started’, by right-clicking on each top-level area, selecting ‘Set Area State’, then selecting ‘Not Started’.

Data Owner Interviews

The aim of the interviews with Data Owners is to confirm their sign-off requirement priorities. A good way to do this is to ask them is “What would stop you from giving your permission to switch off the current system(s)?”

The Data Owner will need to confirm whether each proposed test area in the draft snapshot is relevant. If not, ‘Include in project’ should be deselected. If the test area is to be included, it can be renamed locally by changing the ‘External’ label and details of the Data Owner’s requirements can be recorded in the ‘Test’ text box.

The Data Owner may also have requirements that weren’t included in the original snapshot. These can be added to any area, by right clicking on that area and selecting ‘Add child’.

Details of the sign-off requirements can be recorded in the same style as those imported from the template.

After this has been saved, it appears in the hierarchy of Areas, with a tick in the ‘Local’ column to indicate that it is a local requirement.

After all sign-off requirements have been confirmed with Data Owners, another snapshot can be saved and downloaded. This can serve as an appendix to the data migration strategy.

Plan Milestones

The other area of preparation is to add plan milestone dates. When a template is first added to a project, a plan with a single milestone called ‘Preparation’ is created.

The name of this milestone can be changed and other milestones added. These milestones should align with the milestones for the wider project.

A date needs to be recorded for each additional milestone. This is the date that the milestone starts.