There’s an inclination to treat environmental discovery as a tick-box exercise before the actual work begins.

Export the report from the assessment tool and move on to the execution.

That’s backwards.

Most migration outcomes can be determined by the discovery process. If you don’t know what you’re moving – the dependencies between systems and unofficial configurations – you’re not planning your migration. You’re improvising.

The best migration experts I’ve met spend a disproportionately high amount of their time on discovery as compared to execution. Not because the execution is easy but because a thorough discovery makes the execution predictable.

You can recover if you have a slow execution. You cannot recover from discovering an important dependency at 2AM on cutover evening.

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