Ready Assessment

The Ready Assessment is a preliminary planning stage, where the Customer and the Supplier that will be performing the migration project define the project scope and how the project will be executed.

The Ready stage consists of two main phases:

On-site activities, performed at the customer’s site
Off-site activities, performed at the supplier’s site

Each phase consists of several activities, as shown in the following diagram:

This document contains an overview of the different activities that comprise a Ready analysis. A detailed explanation of the process is presented in the document titled Ready Program Guide.

On-site activities

The main objective of the Ready analysis is to gather information. To attain this goal, a Supplier consultant travels to the client’s offices to meet with the key stakeholders of the project. All the data obtained during this visit is important for creating an accurate estimate of the project.

The on-site portion of the ready can be divided in three main areas:

Understanding the environment: gathering knowledge of the context in which the project will be performed.
Gathering technical information: Once the context of the application is understood, it is necessary to gather the technical information that will be the basis for the estimate of the migration project.
Project Management: It is also important to gather information about the administrative tasks that will be performed during an eventual migration project.

Off-site activities

Once the on-site portion of the Ready has been executed, it is necessary to consolidate and analyze all the information to create a report with the results of the analysis. The following activities take place in this phase.

Documentation Setup

A standard information repository will be created to store all artifacts created during the visit, as well as all the analysis and final documentation generated during the Ready. This repository needs to hold the following information:

Source code: all the source code, in the source technology as delivered by the client, as well as all the necessary databases, third party components, licenses and other files.
Migrated code: the migrated Customer code, in the target platform. In some technologies, this code does not necessarily run or compile.
Code analysis: all the code analysis documents should be placed here, including results from analysis tools.
Estimation document: documents and spreadsheets used to estimate migration effort and cost will be placed here.
POC: if a Proof of Concept is made, its source and target code, as well as related documents, will be placed here.
SOW: all the generated versions of the Statement of Work, from the first draft to the final signed version, will be kept in this folder.
Application Documents: Contains all the documentation about the application delivered by the client.
Test Cases: Holds any sample test cases used during the ready analysis.
Mail: Outlook PST file or equivalent with all the emails generated as part of the Ready process.

Source code analysis

During this activity, the source code of the application to migrate will be analyzed further to get a more accurate view of its migration complexity, and to obtain information that will allow the Supplier to make better recommendations on how the migration project should be executed. Information about EWIs, Customer conversion requirements and the consultant’s technical criteria will be used to search for the following items:

Customization Opportunities: source code items that have equivalents in the target platform, but are not currently supported by the migration tool can be considered as Customization Opportunities, yielding a cost reduction in the project.
Migration difficulties and risks: based on the complexity of the source code, Customer special requirements gathered during the on-site part of the Ready Assessment and expert criteria, the consultant will generate a list of foreseen migration difficulties and risks.

Migration project estimation

This activity is intended to produce cost and effort estimations for the migration project. Two estimations are generated:

Customization Opportunities (if applicable): the necessary effort to customize the migration tool, in order to support the items in the list of automation opportunities has to be estimated in this activity.
Migration project estimation: estimates the effort necessary to migrate the Customer’s Application. This task takes into account the expected benefit of the identified customizations, special conversion requirements, application testing strategies and test cases.

Report generation

A formal document is generated with the results of the Ready Assessment.

Results Presentation

After the Ready document has been sent to the customer for review, a Final Presentation will take place with Supplier personnel and the main contacts from the Customer.

Ready Handover

A standard information package will be prepared with all the requirements and information gathered during the Ready, so that the consulting team can use it as input and perform the project in the same way that it was planned during the Ready.