Governance structure and cadence

Before the formal project kickoff, work with your project sponsor and stakeholders to establish mechanisms to communicate delivery progress for both the executive and non-executive stakeholders. Sharing the defined mechanism should be part of the project kickoff and should visually depict the communication cadence, objectives, and participants within each governance layer. The governance structure helps participants understand how the project will be managed, who the leaders are, how leaders will oversee the project, how decisions will be made, how and when issues will be escalated, and how progress will be measured.

The following diagram shows a top-down approach in the governance layers. The top three layers are the management layers, which are responsible for establishing the large migration strategy, program governance, and the workstream approach. The bottom three layers are the delivery layers, which are responsible for governing the communication gates and regular meetings, such as infrastructure and operations meetings, and migration business hours.

The following table describes the objectives and typical participants for each governance layer.

Governance layer	Objective	Participants
Strategic governance	Develop business and strategic plans, review contractual commitments, address escalated issues, and check overall performance.	Executive sponsor or executive steering committee Leads for partners or consultants Migration delivery leadership
Program governance	Report and review the status of all workstreams, determine the need for resources or subject matter experts, and allocate time for migration team reporting.	Workstream owners Leads for partners or consultants Migration lead Scrum masters
Workstream approach	Support and review the status of planned and completed activities, and review blocked items for the PMO, foundation workstream, migration workstream, and Cloud Ops team.	Workstream leads Scrum master Team members Owners defined in the RACI matrix Managers for partners or consultants Project manager Migration lead
Application owner commit meetings	Confirm commitment to the wave that is scheduled to start	Application owners Leads for partners or consultants Migration lead Communication lead Custom migration lead
Infrastructure and operations	Review the progress of the migration, review active issues, and decide whether escalation is required. Collaborate across workstreams and plan resources for the next sprint.	RACI-defined members Migration lead Lead architect Consultants for the migration, applications, SQL, or other special workloads
Migration business hours	Provide application owners with an open meeting to seek support or guidance.	Leads for partners or consultants Application owners Migration lead Engagement manager