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