I have been given the direction to develop a Data Centre Migration Practice. I have managed a half dozen Data Center move projects that have all been successful. Yet each move has felt like the team was re-inventing the wheel. We want to develop a Practice or Franchise that includes everything we need to migrate a Data Center and Transition the support of that Data Centre, including all Applications, Servers, Storage, Network, Data Protection and Security for the site.
The plan is to have templates and processes for each phase of the program.
• Business Cases to help develop the RFP with prospective customers
• Cost Models to assure our Finance department we have thought of all contingencies and can deliver the program profitably.
• Marketing material to assist in growing Managed I.T. Services (MITS) and the Data Center Migration Business.
o Benefits statement for why to move
o Reference accounts and Success stories
• Sales collateral to anticipate questions and requirements from our customers.
• Bid and Sales response templates. (Our sales people have trouble selling these services)
• Discovery processes. Inventory of Hardware, Applications, Databases, Firewall, Load Balancer, Storage, etc
• Contract templates
• Project Plan collateral:
o High level project plans to identify timelines, activities, effort, baselines
o Project Budget
o Charter template
o Communications plan
o Change Management plan
o Resource Plans to identify all the skill sets needed and when
o Risk Management plan
o Quality Assurance
• Methods to discover, understand, analyze and document Application Affinity groups to break migrations into manageable work groups
• Methods of Procedure to migrate servers, storage, applications
• Migration Strategy guide with Tools & Strategies for different move methods
• Architecture templates for building the landing site
• Communications plans & tools for keeping a large team on the same page. Templates for Shared Calendars, SharePoint sites, discussion groups
• Tracking and Reporting tools, Dashboards.
As this group are the professionals associated with Data Centers, I would like your feedback on other collateral you think we should be pulling together.