Track the KPIs for a Successful SharePoint Migration
Scope creep is a familiar term to most of us, yet it continues to 
permeate our teams and cripple our projects, sometimes unfettered. There is one way to stop scope creep within your SharePoint migration planning -- have your project deliverables defined up front, at project launch. Know what it means to complete the project. Have it documented and approved by the project stakeholders and your executive sponsor.
How do you know when your migration has been successful? There are a number of measurements or milestones you can use - it depends on the business drivers for your migration. Whether your migration happens over a single weekend as an in-place upgrade, or as a phased and iterative process spread out across multiple weeks as you migrate teams and systems and sites, by business priority and as complex integrations and customizations are completed.
Having clear success metrics defined up front will help your team (and, more specifically, your management) to see the progress. More importantly, having a defined conclusion will keep other new (albeit important) features from slipping in, bloating the project plan, and extending the project indefinitely. Here's how it typically plays out: initially, your goal is to migrate 500 existing sites and their content to 2010. Midway through the project, the management team decides they also want to include the new user profiles (My Sites) and some of the new social media capabilities. Fine. You extend the schedule a week so you have time to work with the end users to capture requirements and modify the plan. The management team grumbles at the delay, but agrees.
A couple weeks later, an executive realizes the plan does not include key integration to the home-built ticketing system built on top of Dynamics CRM, and insists the effort fits within the scope. You attempt to extend the project schedule by 6 weeks for this massive new requirement, but the rest of the management team becomes upset, and there begins to be some infighting. Not your fault, of course, but you get some of the blame anyway. And all the CEO knows, who is somewhat sheltered from all the activity on the ground, is that the original project timeline - which was communicated to the board - was a week ago, and SharePoint 2010 is still "in progress."
Sound familiar? Even the best project managers can get sidelined by office politics if they don't take the steps up front to clearly define and document the scope of the project - and get signoff.
What is a successful migration? What are the right measurements? Possible metrics might include:
- The successful migration of a target number of end users to the new platform (100% of users is ideal, yes, but is 85% acceptable? Probably).
- Or maybe success means that a targeted number of sites have been migrated, with a specified amount of content (maybe 90% of the content databases moved).
- Another key measurement might be a percentage of file shares migrated, and their hardware decommissioned.
These are all valid metrics. The idea here is to define the scope of your project – and the measurements for success – up front, as part of your bottom-up and top-down sign-off -- so that it is clear to everyone (including yourself) when goals have been reached, when commitments have been met, and when your migration can be positioned as successful. Know your migration KPIs, and you'll be able to manage the scope creep when it inevitably rears its ugly head.