Five Lessons Every IT Team Learns During an Email Migration

Over the past few years, we've read more email migration stories than we could even count. From IT admins mid-crisis, case studies from companies twice our size, and evaluations shared by teams who'd clearly learned something the hard way.

And there is a particular point in almost every migration story that we have witnessed so far, and it usually appears in the second half of it. Basically, it is a transitional phase or a point that shows us that the author is now going to explain what they actually learned from the migration experience.

That point is often something like here is what we would do differently next time, or here is the lesson learned from the migration experience. For this reason, we have started to analyze such points in order to see what kind of lessons every migration story eventually admits.

Lesson 1: Planning always takes longer than anyone expects, and that's fine

Nearly every story we came across, the successful ones especially, spent far more time on assessment and planning than on the actual migration itself.

In several stories, it was revealed that the migration team, which underestimated the amount of time needed for proper migration planning, had made some major blunders.

Moreover, the teams that treated planning as an important but necessary thing have consistently had smoother outcomes than those eager to just get it over with.

Lesson 2: We should have done testing with more complex groups

Another interesting lesson learned from the migration experience, which was somehow not admitted explicitly, was that several migration teams did testing runs with less complex groups, while there were more complex departments or organizations ahead.

Such testing obviously did not reveal the potential issues that could be discovered in more complex departments or organizations, which later became an obstacle for migration. Obviously, the migration planning software was not used in accordance with its main purpose.

Lesson 3: We did not realize that our employees would notice everything

Several stories revealed that the teams that successfully performed migration did not understand how much attention should be paid to employees. Sometimes, employees found out about some minor issues during the migration process that actually could have been detected earlier.

Thus, it can be concluded that migration is complete only when employees confirm that everything has worked properly.

Lesson 4: Doing migrations manually cost us much more time than we initially planned

One of the lessons learned from the migration experience, which seems to be a discovery to many people, was that migration teams spent way more time doing the migration manually than they would have needed for doing it automatically.

Moreover, several teams clearly stated that they knew it from the beginning, and the next time they would choose a right tool for mailbox migration, like a dedicated offline email migrator tool.

Lesson 5: We did not verify everything we needed to before doing the actual migration

That is why the last lesson learned from the migration experience seemed very common for all stories. Several stories revealed that the team did not initially verify everything, and sometimes it took them quite a long time to realize that something was missing.

Moreover, sometimes it was not realized by the team before an external audit or customer feedback.

Reading enough of these stories left us with a fairly simple takeaway: “Migration failures are rarely dramatic or unpredictable when you look closely enough.”

Conclusion

After going through so many migration stories, one thing becomes clear: most migration problems are not caused by one major mistake. They usually come from several small things that were overlooked, underestimated, or discovered too late.

Planning, realistic testing, employee feedback, the right migration approach, and thorough verification may not sound particularly complicated. Yet, these are exactly the areas where migration teams repeatedly discover what they should have done differently.