How to Mitigate Risks During an M&A Migration
It feels good, doesn’t it? The flow you achieve when you’ve mastered a task and can perform it consistently and predictably time after time. That’s where a lot of ITSPs and MSPs have gotten with their Microsoft 365 migration services. Not quite cookie-cutter, but basic enough to have a pretty good idea of what it will take to get it done.
Then along comes a project you’ve never encountered before. You know deep down, you can’t just tack on your standard pricing and implementation method for a unique or complicated migration. You need to understand what’s really going on in the environment.
Mergers and acquisitions are the kind of projects that require thoughtful scoping to make sure your profitably meets your customer’s requirements. They’re high-stakes projects that involve a relatively unknown landscape. A lot can go wrong – or you can bring incredible value to your customers. The key to accurate migration project scoping is knowing.
Estimating the time and cost of a Microsoft 365 migration
To properly scope an M&A migration, you need to know the lay of the land. And the only way to do that is to look inside the Microsoft 365 environment to understand its size and complexity. When combining companies, the internal IT team may not have the necessary insights into what a migration will entail. It’s easy to over promise and under deliver if you don’t understand all of a project’s parameters.
Two of the most important things you want to get right when estimating a migration are cost and timing. These become customer expectations – you want to avoid missing the deadline or having to deliver the news of a cost overrun. What is often derided as “scope creep” may simply have its roots in a poorly planned project.
An inadequately scoped project can leave you holding the bag if you have to bring in additional resources at the last minute. If the completion of the migration is delayed, you risk causing lost productivity and user frustration when employees are already wondering what a merger or acquisition means to them.
Ready to learn more about the Microsoft 365 migration assessments?
Insight to ensure a smooth migration
At BitTitan, we believe careful scoping should be part of every migration project. It’s essential with mergers and acquisitions because the consequences can be deal-breaking and lead to the loss of future opportunities with your customer.
That’s why we created Migration Assessments so you can understand the source and destination environments for a Microsoft 365 migration. This helps you fine-tune your estimate and adds valuable insights to the project.
When you have visibility into the size and complexity of your customer’s mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and Public Folders, you’re able to present them with highly accurate estimates for licensing, scheduling, and resource allocation.
Voleer assessments also allow you to identify potential blind spots, including workloads with large amounts of data so that you can make a plan for slower data speeds and bottlenecks. And you can estimate the Azure storage you’ll need all in one place.
The challenges of manually scoping a migration project
You may already have an approach for scoping your migration projects. Many ITSPs and MSPs have manual processes that involve pulling data workload-by-workload. This is extremely labor-intensive, especially for complex projects, and can be prone to errors. A more efficient and certain approach makes sense when you remind yourself that the time it takes to scope a project is either unbillable or must be factored into the final project cost.
Automated assessments are not only thorough and efficient, the data is presented in a format you can share with your customer as a value-added service. Schedule an assessment post-migration so your customer understands the shape of their environment once the project is complete. This also gives you an opportunity to talk to them about additional services.
IT assessments add value long after the migration
Add value to all your projects with IT assessments from Voleer. Customers will appreciate the additional insights before, during, and at the close of any engagement.
We’d love to show you how Voleer assessments work, but you can also see for yourself with our free trial. Sign up today and take Voleer for a spin.
For more on how Voleer assessments help refine your project scoping, contact us today.
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