Implementation &
Migration Services
Migrations and Rollouts, Run in Stages
Most of the work on this page is moving something that is already carrying traffic: a phone system, a data center, a set of workloads, a fleet of sites. The technology is rarely the hard part. The hard part is sequencing it so the business keeps running while it happens, and knowing what you do at three in the morning when a stage does not come up the way it did in the lab.
What Is Included
Design, Build, Cutover, Handover
Installation is the smallest part of a deployment. What decides how it goes is the order things happen in, who has signed off on what before each stage starts, and whether the people who have to use the thing on Monday have been told anything about it. We would rather over-communicate the sequence than find out on the night that a dependency was somebody else’s assumption. What the work covers:
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Design before build:
A design that names what is moving, in what order, and what each stage depends on. Where a low-level design is warranted we write one, and it is complete enough for somebody else to build from if you take it elsewhere. -
Migration in stages:
Data and systems moved workload group by workload group, inside change windows agreed with you, with a way back out of each stage written and timed before it starts. -
Project management:
One plan, named owners on both sides, and a change process agreed at kickoff. Lead times and change-window availability move dates more often than engineering does, so we build the schedule on those and say so when a requested date will not hold. -
Integration work:
Where the new platform has to talk to something you already run — a directory, a ticketing system, a records system — that is scoped as its own piece with its own test, because it is where a rollout usually stalls. -
Handover and enablement:
As-built documentation, runbooks for the routine tasks, and time with the people who will run it. Where end users are affected, we agree in advance who tells them and when.
How a Project Runs
How the Schedule Is Built, and What Moves It
A date comes out of three things: how long the engineering takes, how long the hardware or the carrier takes to arrive, and how many change windows you can actually give up between now and then. The third is usually the binding constraint and the first is usually the one people ask about. We build the schedule on all three, publish it, and tell you when something has moved rather than at the review afterward.
What That Looks Like in Practice
- A written sequence with the dependencies marked, so it is visible what cannot start until something else has finished.
- A back-out for each stage, written and timed before that stage runs, and rehearsed where rehearsing it is possible.
- A named person on our side and a named person on yours, and a standing call while the project is live rather than a status report nobody reads.
Integration Work
Where a New Platform Meets What You Already Run
Almost every rollout has at least one connection to something older than itself: a directory, an ERP, a records system, a piece of line-of-business software somebody wrote a decade ago. Those connections are where rollouts stall, because they are usually owned by a different team and were scoped as a footnote. We take them out of the footnotes at scoping, name who owns each side, and test them before the cutover rather than during it.
What We Look At
- Which systems have to exchange data with the new platform, what they exchange, and who owns each side of it.
- Whether the integration is supported by the manufacturer or has to be built, because the two carry very different maintenance costs.
- What happens to the integration when either side is upgraded, which is the question nobody asks until the first upgrade.
After Go-Live
What Happens Once It Is Live
Go-live is the point at which an environment starts drifting away from its documentation. Some clients run the new environment themselves after handover and some hand it to us. Either way the handover pack has to be good enough for the first of those to work, because being the only people who can operate what we built is not a position we want to be in and not one you should accept.
What You Get at Handover
- A handover pack that matches what was actually built, not what the design said before discovery changed it.
- Runbooks for the tasks your team will do routinely, written for somebody who was not on the project.
- A defined period after go-live where we are still on hand for the questions that only surface in real use.
Tell Us What Is Moving, and When
Tell us what you are moving, how many sites it touches and what date is driving the timeline. We will tell you what we think the sequence should be and where we think the date is at risk. Anyone quoting a duration before discovery has finished is guessing, and that includes us.