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Cloud migration functions

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Cloud migration teams are the modern-day equivalent of technical implementation teams or project teams. But the nature of the cloud may require a more fluid team structure. Some migration teams focus exclusively on cloud migration, while others focus on innovations that take advantage of cloud technologies. Some include the broad technical expertise required to complete large adoption efforts, like a full datacenter migration, while others have a tighter technical focus and may move between projects to accomplish specific goals, for example, a team of data platform specialists who help convert SQL VMs to SQL PaaS instances.

Regardless of the type or number of cloud migration teams, these teams generally provides subject matter expertise for IT, business analysis, or implementation partners.

Prerequisites

  • Create an Azure account: The first step to using Azure is to create an account.
  • Azure portal: Tour the Azure portal features and services, and customize the portal.
  • Introduction to Azure: Get started with Azure. Create and configure your first virtual machine in the cloud.
  • Azure fundamentals: Learn cloud concepts, understand the benefits, compare and contrast basic strategies, and explore the breadth of services available in Azure.
  • Review the Migrate methodology.

Minimum scope

The nucleus of all cloud adoption efforts is the cloud migration team. This team drives the technical changes that enable adoption. Depending on the objectives of the adoption effort, this team may include a diverse range of team members who handle a broad set of technical and business tasks.

At a minimum, the team scope includes:

Deliverable

The primary deliverable from any cloud migration team is the timely, high-quality implementation of the technical solutions outlined in the adoption plan, in alignment with governance requirements and business outcomes, using the technology, tools, and automation solutions that are available.

Ongoing monthly tasks

Team cadence

We recommend that teams providing cloud adoption capability be dedicated to the effort full-time.

It's best if these teams meet daily in a self-organizing way. The goal of daily meetings is to quickly update the backlog, and to communicate what has been completed, what is to be done today, and what things are blocked, requiring additional external support.

Release schedules and iteration durations are unique to each company. But a range of one to four weeks per iteration seems to be the average duration. Regardless of iteration or release cadence, we recommend that the team meets all supporting teams at the end of each release to communicate the outcome of the release, and to reprioritize upcoming efforts. It's also valuable to meet as a team at the end of each sprint, with the cloud center of excellence or cloud governance team to stay aligned on common efforts and any needs for support.

Some of the technical tasks associated with cloud adoption can become repetitive. Team members should rotate every 3–6 months to avoid employee satisfaction issues and maintain relevant skills. A rotating seat on cloud center of excellence or cloud governance team can provide an excellent opportunity to keep employees fresh and harness new innovations.

Baseline capability

Depending on the desired business outcomes, the skills needed to provide full cloud adoption capabilities could include:

  • Infrastructure implementers
  • DevOps engineers
  • Application developers
  • Data scientists
  • Data or application platform specialists

For optimal collaboration and efficiency, we recommend that cloud adoption teams have an average team size of six people. These teams should be self-organizing from a technical execution perspective. We highly recommend that these teams also include project management expertise, with deep experience in agile, Scrum, or other iterative models. This team is most effective when managed using a flat structure.

Out of scope

Additional support from existing IT staff may be needed. IT can be a valuable contributor to cloud adoption by becoming a cloud broker and a partner for innovation and business agility.

What's next

Adoption is great, but ungoverned adoption can produce unexpected results. Align with the cloud governance team to accelerates adoption and best practices, while reducing business and technical risks.

These two teams create balance across cloud adoption efforts, but is considered an MVP because it may not be sustainable. Each team is wearing many hats, as outlined in the responsible, accountable, consulted, informed (RACI) charts.

Learn more about organizational antipatterns: silos and fiefdoms.