I didn’t know when the project started that the runbook would support over $2 billion in divestiture value. I just knew the migration plan had to be bulletproof.

This wasn’t a lift-and-shift. In a divestiture, two companies have to operate independently the moment cutover completes. There’s no grace period, no shared infrastructure to fall back on.

The runbook had to account for cutover procedures, rollback steps, stakeholder sign-off gates, and identity separation milestones — in that order. Using Quest Migration Manager, we migrated 500+ Azure AD objects with every dependency documented before anything moved.

What made it work wasn’t the technical detail. It was that every stakeholder — identity, business, security, network — could read it and act on it without an engineer in the room to translate.

Engineers write migration plans. Executives ratify business continuity instruments. A good runbook is both at the same time.

Divestiture migrations are their own discipline. The sequencing is different, the stakes are different, and the engineers who’ve done it carry a profile that’s hard to replicate from consolidation experience alone.

The runbook isn’t a technical manual. It’s the document that keeps two businesses running on day one of being separate companies.

#Divestiture #M365Migration #AzureMigration