Task: Kicking off the migrate phase
To start the migrate phase of the project, you schedule a kickoff meeting. This meeting occurs once during the large migration project. Typically, you conduct this meeting as early as possible in stage 1, initializing a large migration. Aligning the project team members and setting expectations early helps the workstreams understand their responsibilities and build their runbooks. The purpose is to align the stakeholders and workstreams regarding the project scope, guiding principles, communication plan, and team member responsibilities.
In this task, you do the following:
Step 1: Build a kickoff presentation
In this step, you create a presentation for the kickoff meeting. As noted in the following steps, to create this presentation, you need some of the plans and processes that you define in other tasks in this playbook.
There are nuances to every project, but we recommend starting with the Kickoff presentation template (Microsoft PowerPoint format) available in the project governance playbook templates. This template contains the core components, and you can customize it for your project. While you should review and customize the entire template, at a minimum, update the following slides:
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On slide 4, define the project scope, guiding principles, factors that are critical to success, and the criteria by which success will be measured. You might work with a project management office, stakeholders, and the migration team to customize this slide for your organization.
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On slide 5, create a roadmap of the high-level schedule for your project.
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On slide 6, document the teams and key individuals involved in the migration. Identify individuals who are providing support from other teams in the organization, such as networking. Identify individuals by name and role, and differentiate internal and external resources. For a list of common roles in a large migration project, see Roles in the Foundation playbook for AWS large migrations.
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On slide 10, add the T-minus schedules from Step 2: Create a T-minus schedule template. Add new slides as needed to include a T-minus schedule for each migration strategy, such as replatform or refactor.
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On slide 13, update the meeting plan according to Step 3: Define meetings and their cadence.
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On slide 16, add the escalation plan according to Step 2: Establish an escalation plan.
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On slide 20, add links to your shared repository and project management resources.
Step 2: Conduct the kickoff meeting
In this step, you schedule and conduct the kickoff meeting. Do the following:
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Schedule the kickoff meeting to occur as early as possible in the migrate phase. Typical meeting participants include the project stakeholders, executive leadership, and the workstream leads.
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Conduct the kickoff meeting and use the presentation you created in the previous step, Step 1: Build a kickoff presentation.
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If there are any changes to the plans and processes presented in the meeting, after the meeting, update the plans accordingly.
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Save the kickoff presentation in a shared repository so that all members of the large migration project can access the presentation as needed.
Task exit criteria
This task is complete when you have done the following:
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You have customized the Kickoff presentation template for your project.
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You have conducted the kickoff meeting.
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You have saved the kickoff presentation in a shared repository.
