Data Migration Project - The Team Members

As I posted before, at the beginning you need to expect the functional decisions to start the data migration design, so, we should prepare and develop the Data Migration Strategy Document, do you remember ?,

So, today we are going further about the 2 topics that are on it, which  are:

• The choice of the team members.
• The team organization.

Look at this chart:

As just an illustration, we could see the organization above just to see how we configured our internal teams throughout  the project.

The choice, now, we will describe it...

Data Migration Leader:

The person who is responsible to manage the Data Migration Team. 

Define a schedule, and all migration cycles, metrics and status report, keep Manager`s Board informed about evolution, Status Report Meetings, Ensure the interaction between other teams and data migration team, keep the high motivation of all team members, among others.

Data Migration Legacy Coordinator and team members:
In this position you should indicate the professional who has a strong and wide knowledge about legacy systems, mailny their data models.Ability to manage schedule and team. Ability to Interact with other teams and Partners. As I told before in our project it was my role.

About the team members: I remember when we  started to define the candidates to join us as Legacy Team member, we just had a short-list to fulfill a particular set of objects based on our previous working experience with the professional on it,  after that,  we made a package where we add their accomplished jobs, their knowledge about our business and their skills, so, after,  we compare them with our primary set of SAP IS-U/CCS objects to be migrated. Warning you, when you see them, I am sure, you will  understand it, and you are able to do this comparison.

Some skills that we could list are: Knowledge about PL/SQL languade, Oracle DBA, Database Performance settings, etc...

Let me give you an example that we used:

The  consultant named John made a successful job in the past solving a big issue about DW- Financial Report, it involved stored Bill Data in our legacy database. So, making a relation between legacy data and SAP IS-U/CCS data, he was able to extract Bill Data from our legacy database and migrate them to SAP ISU-CCS related objects, as such Open Items or even Bill Documents.

Data Conversion SAP Team Coordinator and team members:

In this position you should indicate the professional who has a strong and wide knowledge about legacy systems,.As I told before in our project it was my role.About the team members: when we think about SAP environment it is likely that a Consultant will be joining you in your project  had a knowledge to handle with the team based on their experience, so, make your yourself comfortable with the team choice when they introduce to you. From theprofessional it is important to know: background, skills, previous projects and etc…

Some skills that we could list are: Knowledge about transaction EMIGALL, ABAP Programming, interpersonal skills.

Data Cleansing Team Coordinator and team members:

In this position you should indicate the professional who has a strong knowledge about  data flow through the business process.
Ability to manage schedulle and team. Ability to Interact with other teams and Partners.

One important team is the Data Cleansing Team, its main goal is to provide data which has completeness, accuracy,  integrity, among other indexes of data quality must be submitted to both procedures data quality and data cleaning aiming to ensure their correct migration. The interaction between Data Cleansing Team and Data Migration Team is essential to get the quality in data migration cycles. For that, I suggest you implementing the data quality management for each data, following the steps:

Identify…, measure, define rules, correct… and monitor, over and over… Whenever you have  test, simulation of data migration. Apply them before. as shown in this chart.

Another important issue to consider in the Data Cleansing Team: It has to be formed in essence as business team, it has to get business members where they need to know the business rules around the Company and particularly object rules that are involved in the Data Migration Project, they will be responsible for connection between business areas and the Project Team.

Let me you give another example:

There are approximately  100 great customers which have cadastration problems,  where the field Zip Code in their address are incorrect, we could just set the values for this field through automatic functions and then migrate them, or ask to the responsible business area to fill them manually.

In both options Data Cleansing Team has started the process, as I mentioned before, by identification, measurement, defining rules, correcting and monitoring, just to make sure that these problems will not occur again.

Next post, we will detail the roles and responsibilities for each position that were described above. Ok ?

Sentence of the day: "Success is more permanent when you achieve it without destroying your principles.” – Walter Cronkite

Data Migration Project - Introduction

I would like to apologize for this, but first we are going to ask to Wikipedia. What´s Data Migration ?

In my particular case, two reasons  qualified me to join in this data migration project:

1. A successful CRM implementation that I managed in the past.I had been working with CRM System as system analyst, I had acquired a great knowledge about CRM data model and its main functionalities. I was responsible for maintenance of CRM System in the Company, I was able to understand where the data was and how I could access it. Its connections  with other corporate systems as GIS System and mainly the Billing System. Because of this, every time I had to deepen their understanding of what it was like and the flow of data between these systems,  I improved the capability of understanding their data model individually. So, in a certain moment I was in the middle of a new challenge that would be able to  qualify me to join in this project.
2.  Data Administration: I was a Data Administrator, one of my responsibilities were to understand and to manage the data model of all transactional systems, as I mentioned above.Apply a data quality management for all of them , manage data models both Transactional and Analytical.Specify data validation, verification and reconciliation strategies in both environments: Transactional and Analytical.

Provide support to developers in both systems CRM and Billing, among others. 

I have known from the beginning that I had a great opportunity to face a huge challenge in my career and I was joining both subjects  that I really liked to work, CRM and Data. From that moment , I started my preparation to face it…

The work has begun… From this point I suppose that all tasks before the kick-off meeting were made and below are the related important issues that you have to consider within the first 30 days of the project, at least. Remember, at the beginning you need to expect the functional decisions to start the data migration design, so, just after that, you could think to develop any extract program or ETL procedure.

Therefore, you must have planning after planning, take an advantage from that, develop  one of the most important document that you will have in our hand during the project life, that will give you all instructions to achieve your goals:

• Data Migration Strategy , which comprehends:
• The choice of the team members.
• The team organization.
• Roles and Responsibilities of each data migration member.
• The main activities that will be executed during  the project life related to data migration.
• The objects that will be target to migration, previously identify that SAP IS-U/CCS and CRM needs to start to working. They are provided in a SAP documentation.
• Conversion Tools, both legacy and SAP.
• IS Migration Performance in SAP Environment (SAP provides a document that helps you to enhancement the performance of  migration).
• Data Migration Performance in legacy system, based on choice of tools that will be
• Documentation, relate all the documents that will give a data migration team during the project life. Functional documents, standards, flat files, specifications, ETL programs, PL/SQL procedures, Binary files, Log files, Management documents,  Status, everything that you need.
• Data Cleaning strategies to support data migration
• Data Migration Cycles, test and simulation that will occur during the project, previously scheduled.
• Status Report and Metrics to follow the Data Migration progress.
• Risks and Issues about data migration
• Reconciliation rules in each data migration cycle.

Please, don´t worry, you will check this document, once, twice, a hundred times if you need, but I can sure you, you will be prepare to start any data migration activity after that.But...

Tip(s): There is important tip that I should give you during this planning period is: There is in SAP IS-U/CCS a specific transaction which was developed aiming of load of data, its name is EMIGALL. This transaction read just binary files. So, If you have choose it,  you will need to investigate how much your environment is prepared to generate this kind of file.

Sharing my experience with you.

Our data were stored in Oracle Database version 8 and 9i, obviously, we decided to use Oracle PL/SQL procedures as way to carry out the data extracting directly from it.

We spent a several time trying to understand how we could do extract at same time both files,
Text: it would help the extraction team to trace and find possible errors in data migration procedures.
Binary:  it was necessary and load it in SAP successfully.

After I many tests we found a way to generate a binary file through the  enablement of JAVA layer inside the Oracle Database, as showed in this picture ->  
...but, we had to pay attention:

• It was possible to be done just in the Oracle Database version 9 or upper.
• It was necessary the previous installation of components into Database. You should to check with your database administrator which are them.
• We had a additional step after that to handle with extract programs developed in Oracle Database 8, we were afraid of impact our extraction performance because that, but how we found this problem  in advance, we inserted this step in our migration window.  
• If the previous conditions are not possible to performing, also, you keep contact with Companies that had a similar issues when implemented SAP ISU. I talk this, because we spent a lot time to discuss with other Company at that time, we asked for help, every call we were able to understand the mechanism, even tough, they had other architecture in your migration environment. But, Every single tip, helps us. Don't you agree ?.

See you... Next post we will discuss about each topic related in the data migrations strategic document.

Sentence of the day: "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." (Dr.Wayne Dyer)