Communication planning for a large migration to the AWS Cloud

Be it a digital transformation to a cloud-first strategy or an organizational divestiture to exit data centers, there are many parallel business unit (BU)-specific or technology-driven activities that will be in process outside of the server migration project. It is extremely important to make sure that all BUs and technology teams work toward the same goal of migrating to the AWS Cloud. In addition, you'll need make sure that all dependent activities that impact the large migration project are aligned within these teams to meet deadlines.

To support the alignment, the migration team must quickly define the communication strategy and cadence that provides a high level of visibility into the project. The large migration plan must foster high customer stakeholder engagement and include communication gates. A communication gate is a point when you formally communicate ongoing wave activities and status to the stakeholders, such as commitment meetings, checkpoints, cutover, hypercare period, and transfer of workloads to the cloud operations (Cloud Ops) team. Communication gates must have clearly defined exit criteria so that teams understand the requirements and can escalate quickly to remove obstacles.