Do you consider the cutover date as the end of your migration project?

The cutover is not a finish line. It is the start of a part of the project which most migration engineers cannot handle. I learned what it was like to support 500+ clients in three different post-migration phases, as part of a five-person Hyper Care Support Team.

You learn quickly that a large support team cannot solve all problems from scratch. The issues that arise after a large-scale enterprise migration are not random. They fall into recognizable groups: authentication failures due to conditional access policies not being updated for the destination tenant; delegate access gaps as Full Access permissions weren’t pre-configured in destination shared mailboxes; and OneDrive sync failures because the UPN change was not propagated to the local client configuration.

Once you’ve seen these patterns twice, you can create a playbook for resolution. The Azure Migration runbook I designed provided a shared reference for the team, so that the third person who saw a failure of authentication in the post-cutover windows would handle it the same as the first person.

The second thing that you learn is stakeholder communication is its own workstream after cutover. Even if a migration-related problem is resolved in 20 minutes, it’s still a crisis for the end user unable to access their mailbox. It is just as important to communicate the status of a ticket during that 20-minute period as it is to close it quickly.

The engineers who are called back to work on the next project were the ones who made it feel manageable for the 30 days following the cutover. This is a completely different skill set than running the migration, and most programs don’t formally staff it until they wish they did.

What is your post-cutover structure like and who owns it

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