When creating a digital governance plan, you must not leave migration planning to chance. Migrations without advance planning will generally require added resources and time. Ensure you consider the following questions as you determine the phases of your launch when planning your migration onto a new platform:

• How has your data structure changed from your former platform to your new platform?
• How will content move from your old platform to your new platform?
• Must your rollout strategy start with a single website, or several related websites?
• Must you soft launch, or perform a hard cutover?
• How will you handle bugs and feedback for the newly launched websites?

When developing your migration process for a governance plan, Acquia recommends you include the following steps:

• Set up a migration team
• Review your content inventory
• Map your data to a migration plan
• Involve a migration specialist

Building a migration team

To ensure a successful migration and launch, your migration team must include members with the following roles:

• Project manager: Ensures the migration adheres to the schedule
• Product owner: Oversees the project, approves the migration plan, and provides final sign-off after launch
• Developers: Owns the technical details of your migration, understands the data model, and performs the migration tasks
• Partner project manager: Coordinates between the organization’s and Acquia’s teams

Depending on the size of your migration, your project may also require a migration specialist to assist with planning migration.

Reviewing your content inventory

Your migration must not move unneeded content to your new platform. To avoid moving unneeded content, your governance team must review the content inventory created at the same time designing your content architecture. You must establish a plan to ensure the unneeded content is not moved to your new platform. For more information, see Designing your content architecture.

Mapping your data to a migration plan

After creating an inventory of your content you must create a spreadsheet to map your existing fields and attributes to the fields and attributes in your new platform. You must determine which content types can migrate programmatically, and which ones must migrate manually.

In both cases, your migration plan must account for the types of effort required:

• Manual migrations require time for copying and error-checking data. You must test the time required to copy the data to the new platform, and clean the data and cross-link the data, if necessary.
• Programmatic migrations require time for creating, testing, and rehearsing each individual script migrating a single content type. Ensure you test scripts and their rollbacks often during the development process.

For more information about migrations, see 10 Tips to Streamline Migration Review on dev.acquia.com.

Involving a migration specialist

Your migration specialist must investigate the technical details of your migration, such as assessing the size of your databases, both to determine the number of content types but also the time required to send data from one source to another.

The migration specialist must also perform small test migrations with your proposed data mappings to identify issues or resolve inconsistencies before the final migration.

Your migration specialist must review the security of your data and determine your needs for security certifications and password protection.

In the following documentation, you will gradually learn more about maintaining your governance plans.