Risk Management: Tips and Tricks to Mitigate Risk During an Audited Upgrade with Microsoft Dynamics GP - Part 3

This series of Risk Management Tips and Tricks chronicles the two large change management projects we undertook for the same client this year.

In the first installment you saw the 26 steps involved followed by the setting of goals, and the development of prototype criteria, testing criteria and the fall-back position in the second installment. In this installment we'll look at laying the groundwork for moving the hosting center.

And to recap the client's situation: the first project upgraded Microsoft Dynamics GP version 10.0 to 2010 and the second project migrated their entire network infrastructure from one hosting center to another. The information we learned from the upgrade assisted in estimating the scope of the network migration project. We recognized that the significantly more complex network migration with numerous vendors and participants would take many more hours of work for communication, scheduling, contract negotiations, and documentation.

Laying the Groundwork for Moving the Hosting Center

In this case, the client utilized a hosting center in Canada and wished to move processing to a US hosting center because of a throttling of the telecommunications across the border, a lack of responsive service from the Canadian hosting center, a desire to maintain closer control, and a significant reduction of costs.

Change management for this project was massive compared to the upgrade. Laying the groundwork, we first identified our project team leaders and established a weekly project review meeting prefaced with an agenda and followed up with notes, requests for approvals, change orders, and approval signatures. Meeting notes reflected the attendees and absences on the weekly teleconference.

The current configuration documentation was updated. We white-boarded several ...