I have recently worked on a network rationalization program, as part of a cost saving exercise for a major multinational corporation. It was not the first time I took part on such a spring cleaning activity, and I started wondering about the key elements that drive the successful delivery of decommissioning projects. Here are my thoughts by phase:
Assess and Discovery
We talk about getting the inventory right. How many servers and applications do we have in scope?
Have we considered the business requirements and their dependencies?
Ultimately the decommissioning process has to meet business needs, facilitate their goals, making transition to a new delivery solutions seamless, mitigating and reducing risks.
Planning
Once the Golden Sources are confirmed and signed off, we need to produce a decommissioning strategy plan, making sure we involve the Business, to understand their needs and requirements, before moving any forward!
A good approach is to create waves or batches to focus on. They can be grouped according to different criteria, such as: dependencies, EOL, location, business needs, cost saving goals.
Different levels of priority can be associated to different waves and your plan will reflect it.
Execution
When we talk decommissioning project we talk PEOPLE.
Many stakeholders ( e.g. product responsibles, server engineers, site / office managers).
Getting the right person to accept your invite will not always be easy or straight forward.
We need to understand that most of our contacts will be busy on their routine (BAU), as well as on internal projects, and finding time to deal with an external consultant who tries to find out the status of their servers /applications, should not be given for granted.
Chasing and pushing people may not be the most enjoyable task at times, but it will play a vital role in seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Sometime, as consultants, we can only do so much and we need internal help to get things moving.
However I believe that is our responsibility to try our best in making everyone involved aware of the importance of the project and the benefits it will bring to their organisation, because at the end of the day if we have to do it we better do it well and smoothly!