Like big organizational change the software migration is complex and should be handled with proper planning. For induviduals or for a large team or for an organization the software migration is a nightmare - so many things can go wrong in long and short migration process.

Software migration is the transferring of data, accounts and functionalities from one environment to another, either in complete or just a module or a piece of functionality. In general software migration can be defined as transfer of applications, databases, operating systems, hardware, technology, content management system, networks, or even the entire IT infrastructure.

Biggest Challenges of software migration

Moving existing systems to latest technology or to a cloud platforms is a difficult and high cost process that may involve technical and non-technical resources and challenges. Lack of understanding of current system and less industrial knowledge results in many migration failures - in achieving organisations’ goals.

The requirements gathering effort for software migration projects is notably different than for a new software system being built from scratch or for adding new functionality to an existing system. We need to understand the current working system - the features and functionalities, the orginal needs, the changes required, the endusers - attitudes, issues & capabilities, end-to-end functionality and involment of differrent departments in the migration process.

The process of analyzing and prioritizing existing features may be time consuming, but it gives the business the opportunity to invest wisely in the new system, ensuring it’s designed to meet today’s needs, which may be very different from the needs at the time the software was originally developed. The change in technology or user interface makes the new software hard to understand and difficult to use, extreme care should be given to the user-friendlines and performance to make the software migration success.

A software migrator who understands the core functionality and knows the business well can easliy fill the gap between current users and current inhouse software team - can prepare a good document about existing system. Current users may know the functionalities but less knowledge about technical working of the system. The orginal software development team in most of the organizations are moved or replaced, only domain experts can find the specific calculations or formulas or in depth technical flow.

Maintaning business continuity during software migration is a big challenge, ERP applicatons are considered as backbone of business operations, any downtime in application can result in risks. Parallel run and fall-back plans will ensure the buisiness continuity. Plan not to migrate the complete system or application - Only Migrate What you Need, the less migration the less problem. Find the best time for migration, the best time to migrate software should be the time that will be least disruptive to the business and its customers. End-user training in advance and migration team preparing also important part of business contigency plan. Adressing of current software issues and difficulties in usability makes the end-users happy and will help to ensure support and cooperation during software migration.

Understanding the source data will help to overcome issues due to duplicates, missing informations, wrong data or even misspellings. Performing a thorough data analysis at the earliest possible occasion, usually when planning and designing your data migration can help you uncover the hidden errors. Existing data validation with new databse and testing with actual data for final results is the best practice to overcome the data migration challenge. Introducing data experts from the planning stage helps to overcome the data transformation.

System integration is the most complex part in the software migration process. System integration refers to all the practices that need to be finished before the new system replaces the old one, including implementing the new system and migrating data, training staff to use the new system, addressing change resistance, setting up support and maintenance processes for the new system, and shutting down the old system. Test early and test often with large volume of data to ensure the quality of new software reduces the chances in integration failure.