Migration isn’t IT’s project. It’s a business transition that IT executes.

One of the most consistent mistakes I see is treating migration as something that happens entirely inside the IT org, with the business receiving an email the week before cutover. That’s not stakeholder management. That’s notification.

Migration touches users, workflows, and daily operations, not just systems. When it runs as a purely technical exercise the gaps show up fast. Communication doesn’t reach the people who needed it. Expectations stay vague. Adoption suffers after go-live because nobody outside IT was prepared for what changed.

Migrations that hold together involve business leaders, end users, and project stakeholders as participants from the start. Not as an audience for status updates, but as contributors who can flag dependencies IT wouldn’t find, identify cutover windows that would hit the business at the worst possible time, and prepare their own teams before the change lands.

Running migration as a technical project solves a technical problem and creates a people problem. Usually both show up on the same Monday morning.

What’s the most useful thing you’ve done to bring business stakeholders into a migration before IT considered them ready to be involved?

#Migration #IT #Business