Phase 3: Prepare for your migration

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Introduction

Now that you have your migration plan in place, it’s time to prepare your team, environments, and data for the transition from Web Help Desk to Service Desk. The preparation phase can take anywhere from hours to multiple days, so be sure to allocate enough time for thorough preparation. If you have resource constraints or need additional support, consider contacting your account manager to connect with a migration expert to help manage the migration process smoothly.

See the PDF version of this Migration Guide.

Preparation tasks

1. Assemble your team.

   Keep in mind that migration is a collaborative effort that requires a well-coordinated team to ensure a successful transition for your organization. Now is the time to assemble your ideal team to drive this initiative forward. Additionally, keep in mind that SolarWinds offers support to assist you throughout the process.

   • Project Manager: Person responsible for creating and presenting the business case, overseeing the migration process, monitoring progress, and coordinating tasks. The project manager serves as the primary contact for the project, ensuring smooth communication and execution.

   • Systems Administrators: Individuals with in-depth knowledge of the configurations, permissions, and setup of your current Web Help Desk instance. They possess the necessary access rights to facilitate the migration and may carry out the migration process. If your team lacks cloud expertise, SolarWinds recommends leveraging our support resources for guidance throughout the migration process. Additionally, if a regional Solution Partner is available, you can request assistance with the technical aspects of the transition.

   • Executive Sponsor: Person who secures budget approval and endorses the business case. The executive sponsor may also act as a champion for the transition within the organization, ensuring alignment with strategic goals.

   • Technical Team and Testers: Individuals responsible for executing test and production migrations. Prior to the full migration, they conduct thorough testing to ensure critical workflows and tasks can be performed seamlessly in the new Service Desk environment. Testers should represent various teams that will use the system, focusing on validating their most essential processes. Examples of these team members may be IT support agents, certain unlicensed approvers, HR or other alternative department agents, and more.

   • Security, Legal, and Compliance Teams: These stakeholders provide crucial input on security, legal, and compliance requirements. Involving them early in the project ensures the migration plan adheres to all necessary standards, preventing potential roadblocks later in the process.

   • Product Champions: These advocates promote the benefits of transitioning to Service Desk and help teams adapt to new ways of working. They may lead training sessions, troubleshoot issues, and develop new workflows to ensure a smooth transition. This role can be filled by a single individual or shared among a group of enthusiastic adopters.

2. Clean up the data in your existing service desk software.

   Migrating larger volumes of data often leads to longer and more complicated processes, which may impact cloud performance in the future. To ensure a seamless transition, it’s advisable to thoroughly clean and organize your instance before moving data to the cloud. Streamlining your data can help simplify the migration and reduce potential performance challenges later in the cloud.

   Here are some key areas to focus on during the cleanup process:

   • Unused or inactive user accounts.
   • Outdated information, including incidents, workspaces, custom configurations, and workflows.
   • Redundant or duplicated data.

   By addressing these areas, you can optimize your transition and improve overall cloud efficiency.

   SolarWinds recommends our customers who are migrating data perform a clean-up of old or unused data before the migration to improve migration speed and performance in a cloud environment.

3. Start a free trial of Service Desk.

   No matter whether you've decided to migrate existing data or build your service desk from scratch, you need to start a free trial of Service Desk. After you have created your trial account, move on the creating a migration runbook.

4. Create a migration runbook.

   Create a comprehensive runbook or a detailed checklist outlining the necessary actions, their sequence, and timelines. Include supporting instructions, assign task owners and necessary approvers, and estimate the duration for each step. Clearly identify any dependencies between tasks that could hinder progress if not completed. Conclude the runbook with a contingency plan, specifying owners and steps to follow in case a rollback is required.

   The structure of the migration runbook may include individual tasks in the following sections:

   • Pre-migration
   • Migration
   • Migration verifications
   • Rollback plan
   • Post-migration

   Your runbook could be setup up as a spreadsheet or using Service Desk's runbook feature.

   Depending on which migration path you chose during planning (migrating data vs. building your service desk from scratch) your runbook may vary.

5. Verify your domain.

   Verifying and setting up your domain for Service Desk is a critical step to ensuring seamless access, security, and branding for your IT service management platform. By configuring a custom domain, you provide users with a professional, branded URL that aligns with your organization’s identity, enhancing trust and recognition. Proper domain setup also simplifies user access by eliminating confusion and ensuring that employees, customers, or stakeholders can easily reach your Service Desk portal.

   For detailed instructions on setting up your domain, refer to SolarWinds's comprehensive guide on domain management.

6. Schedule your migration activities.

   It’s a good idea to create a detailed migration project plan that outlines the tasks, estimated timelines, responsible individuals, and any dependencies for each activity. Once your plan is finalized, the next step is to share it with your team and ensure everyone is informed and aligned about the migration process.

   Your migration activities will vary depending on whether you decided to migrate your existing data or build your new service desk from scratch in Phase 2: Plan your migration.

7. Communicate rollout with stakeholders and IT teams.

   Clear and consistent communication is vital for effective change management, as it keeps stakeholders well-informed about the changes and helps them understand the implications for their roles. This approach fosters organizational support and encourages widespread acceptance of the change.

   Some questions to consider when planning your rollout:

   • How will you communicate this change to impacted teams or individuals (E-mail, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or through managers to their individual teams)?

   • Does the message need to change for different departments or teams?

   • When will you communicate this change? Will these communication timelines be different for different groups? Take into account the effectiveness of repetition and early notice.

   • Who will communicate this change?

   • How will you use your executive sponsor to enroll others in the change?

   • Do you anticipate any resistance to this change? How can you address resistance in your communications, considering factors like change fatigue and varying levels of aversion to change? How might you anticipate resistance and tackle it head on in your communications?

   • How will you notify users of new features, additional training, and information such as the opportunity to become a Champion?

8. Create a training and support plan for all product users.

   Insufficient training and support can result in difficulties for individuals as they adapt to new tools or processes, potentially causing resistance and poor adoption rates. SolarWinds suggests that you focus on identifying the specific training requirements for your users and determining the most effective delivery methods—whether in-person, virtual, or a hybrid approach. Additionally, it’s important to plan the timing and frequency of training sessions to provide users with sufficient opportunities to learn, practice, and address any questions throughout the process.

   Take these questions into consideration when creating your training and support plan:

   • What type of training do you want to offer? (In-person training sessions, train the trainer sessions, lunch and learns, office hours, Q&A sessions, online training, learning management system [LMS] sessions)?

   • Will you need to create separate training for different departments or teams? For example, consider administrator training, end-user training, approver-only training, and reporting training.

   • What will users know, do, and feel as a result of the training?

   • Who is responsible for training? Who will be developing and/or running the training sessions? What resources do they need to be successful?

   • How will you support this change? How will your team support this change? For example, will you use Microsoft Teams, Slack channels, Service Desk ticketing, or a different method?

Next phase

Phase 4: Build your service desk from scratch or migrate existing data