The challenge: Spreadsheets can't handle the complexity of migration programs
Senior leadership at a British-run US company that specializes in the engineering and manufacturing of protection equipment felt that the program of migrations they had planned over the next three years were too risky to be done with their standard tooling of spreadsheets, emails, and project management tools. They felt that due to the scale and complexity of the program, orchestration was going to be close to impossible with these existing tools. They needed a more comprehensive solution to give them visibility of the live event and help them to plan, orchestrate, and analyze the migrations from start to finish. Visibility and communication were especially important because they had remote teams all over the world working together.
Cutover enabled teams to work collaboratively during the migration program
The manufacturer used Cutover to carry out the first of these migrations, updating the payroll system. Teams from across multiple regions including Brazil, Italy, the US, and the UK were involved in the migration and were able to work collaboratively through Cutover. The senior stakeholders were able to keep track of how the migration was going in real time and quickly make decisions based on accurate data.
During their first major migration using Cutover, the leadership team put their full trust in the platform and they were able to completely retire spreadsheets and other manual tools. Cutover was also used to coordinate the third parties involved, providing a single platform that aligned everyone globally and kept all the teams on the same page.
The node map feature clearly visualizes the flow of work as a networked set of processes, which helps to identify parallel tasks and dependencies, manage the critical path, and stay on schedule. This was particularly useful as it provided a way to visualize what needed to be done in real time and enabled those running the migrations to identify a roadblock that they were able to rectify mid-event. The built-in communications in Cutover also enabled those running the event to send automated communications every two hours to keep everyone in the know. This was great for those actually doing the work because they didn’t have to spend time updating others on progress and the major stakeholders including the CIO and CFO didn’t have to ask for updates.
