How a content migration per department prevents problems

Big bang, or not? Most organizations do not like a big bang approach when it comes to content migration. Fortunately, we are also in favor of handling migrations by department, business unit, academy or other similar organizational units. In this blog I show you why and how to approach the migration.

Organizational components differ enormously with regards to content. One department might have a lot of content, while the other department has relatively less content. There are also differences in the type of content. For example, at IT departments we see installation files, while in marketing departments we see completely different files, such as mp4 and design files.

The content that such a department has built up over the years is unique for them and therefore a reason to save and transfer it to a new environment. It is too sensitive to simply migrate, archive or perhaps delete this content without consultation. An approach per department is therefore more diplomatic and practical.

Now of course you want to prevent that all content will be migrated 1-on-1 to a new environment. The reason to migrate in the first place was that you wanted to optimize the information landscape by, for example, migrating archive-worthy content to an archive or migrating collaboration files to SharePoint and saying goodbye to outdated content.

That is why it is necessary to draw up organization-wide rules for the migration. But how do you do that if you also have to take into account the exceptions of the various departments?

We advise and help organizations to draw up an organization-wide migration strategy and to test it in one department that can be seen as the "precursor department". There is a department that really wants to take on the migration challenge with you and that gets excited about such a project. It is precisely in that department that you test the established company-wide migration rules and you carry out the production migration. That project forms the input for a migration plan that can then be used for the rest of the organization. Of course, there are always specific rules for each department that can be included, but the project’s framework is set.