1. Assess

Understanding the current environment before getting involved in migration planning is key to success. ManagementStudio imports data from multiple sources such as Active Directory, Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (MECM) or HR systems.  This produces an “as is” model of the environment with full context around users, their location and department, the machines they use, the applications they use, and the status of those applications.

2. Rationalise

It’s common for an organisation’s application estate to get out of control. Multiple versions of the same product may be in use, and products which have become redundant for the organisation may be remain under management by IT. These situations are an unnecessary source of cost and effort.

3. Prioritise

Now that the in-scope applications for the migration have been defined, it’s time for the Applications Project Manager to start planning the applications work-stream. It’s typical for hudreds of applications to be in scope for a project, and this can take the applications team many months to complete. If we use a “waterfall” project management approach we would look to wait until all (or most) of the applications were ready before we begin our pilot migration. This is necessary to ensure that all the users in the pilot migration have all the applications they require to do their jobs.

4. Prepare

The projection report has shown us which applications to focus on each week. We now use ManagementStudio to assign these applications to individuals in the Applications Team to get them ready for the new environment. AppTracker provides the following benefits:

• AppTracker provides a centralised repository for application lifecycle management
• AppTracker provides a centralised repository for application lifecycle management
• Full integration with ManagementStudio so the migration team get real-time readiness updates as applications are completed
• Collaborative workflow and knowledge management
• Defect tracking
• Quality Assurance to ensure internal standards have been met
• User Acceptance Testing to easily engage with the application owners
  API for integration with third-party solutions such as deployment tools

5. Monitor

As the applications are being prepared for the new environment it’s important that the project team have real-time updates on this work-stream, and can view how this impacts the “readiness to migrate” across the organisation.

6. Deploy

Before we can start to schedule users for migration we need to ensure that the user-base are fully informed of the migration plans. ManagementStudio’s templated emails allow communications to be sent out quickly and easily to departments, locations, or custom groups of users.

It’s typical to spend effort on collecting data about users during the lead up to the deployment phase. ManagementStudio allows the project team to send out customisable User Surveys, allowing the users to validate this data before they are migrated. This significantly increases the chances of success, and improves user satisfaction. The User Survey would typically include contact details, user location, department and an application list. The user can sign-off the survey if the data is correct, or raise a query if there are issues.

7. Automate

Organisations are having to re-think their approach to IT management to meet the demands of Evergreen IT, a management approach that involves making small, iterative updates to IT systems on an ongoing basis rather than undertaking isolated big bang migrations. This has brought about a new set of challenges for IT teams which can significantly increase their workload if they are to maintain secure and reliable systems.

Organisations which don’t adopt this new approach are risking reduced productivity and staff-satisfaction due to insecure systems which don’t provide the latest feature-sets.

ManagementStudio solves many of these challenges by allowing IT teams to leverage automated business logic into the Evergreen process, significantly reducing the amount of manual effort required, increasing security, and reducing risk. This ensures that staff are provided with a fully up-to-date environment which is maintained with a “minimised impact” approach.