Migration backlog review
The actionable output during the planning phase is a migration backlog, which influences all of the prerequisites discussed so far. Development of the migration backlog should be completed as a first prerequisite. This article serves as a milestone to complete prerequisite activities. The cloud strategy team is accountable for the care and maintenance of the digital estate. However, the realization of the resultant backlog is the responsibility of every member of the migration effort. As a final prerequisite, the cloud strategy team and the cloud adoption team should review and understand the migration backlog. During that review, the members of both teams must gain sufficient knowledge to articulate the following key points in the migration backlog.
Business outcomes and metrics
Every member of the team should understand the desired business outcomes. Migrations take time. It's easy for team members to become distracted by urgent but less important activities during migration. Establishing and reinforcing the desired outcomes helps the team understand the priority and relative importance of the migration, enabling better decision-making over time.
Tracking migration progress is equally important to the motivation of the team and to continued stakeholder support. Progress can be tracked through migration KPIs and learning metrics. Regardless of how the effort is tracked, it is important that the team is aware of these metrics so that they can evaluate performance during subsequent iterations.
Business priorities
Sometimes, prioritizing one workload over another may seem illogical to the cloud adoption team. Understanding the business priorities that drove those decisions can help maintain the team's motivation. It also allows the team to make a stronger contribution to the prioritization process.
Core assumptions
The article on digital estate rationalization discusses the agility and time-saving impact of basic assumptions when evaluating a digital estate. To fully realize those values, the cloud adoption team needs to understand the assumptions and the reasons that they were established. That knowledge better equips the cloud adoption team to challenge those assumptions.
Next steps
With a general understanding of the digital estate and migration backlog, the team is ready to move beyond prerequisites and begin assessing workloads.