How the MoroSystems Cloud migrations team set themselves for a winning flow

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Practice makes perfect, and MoroSystems’ team is perfecting its Cloud migration practices. With all the migrations in their rare window, they sure have received a lot of practice already. But practice alone is not enough. Winning also requires having the right tools for the Job. In this case, it was on Adam Rypel, the migration team lead, to set his team up with the right tools to succeed.

Here we share Adam Rypels’ setup. By the end, you'll have all the details that will allow you to configure the same in your environment. Let’s look first at the big picture.

Note: I am the CEO of RadBee, and the Product Manager for Jira Snapshots for Confluence, one of the Apps Adam uses for his setup.

Combining the power of Jira and Confluence

1. The migration team lives in Jira, so that is where they manage the their tasks. Each migration has its own dedicated Jira project, where in the later stage, the Epics for test and prod migration are created. Migration tasks are created within this Epic. All these tasks together form the runbook for the migration.
2. Communications and alignment with the customer is critical for a smooth migration. Confluence is their platform for The customer collaboration and information sharing. Each customer gets a space dedicated to them.
3. Information about the status of the runbook tasks are displayed in Confluence. Adam uses the App Jira Snapshots for Confluence  to share Jira data. Jira Snapshots provides a channel to share Jira data with users who do not have access to Jira, like the customer. It is quicker then exporting excels and importing to Confluence. The runbook also looks better as a table natively embedded on the Confluence page.

Jira Snapshots for Confluence serves as the bridge to open the Jira silo to the customer. The team get's to work in its preferred environment, Jira, and share their progress transparently with their customer.

How the team creates a migration runbook in Jira

The Jira configuration in use is pretty simple: Epic and Task issue types, with a basic workflow for tasks.
The Summary and Description fields contain most of the information. Each Task has two custom fields:

1. Responsibility: A multi-select field with these value options: Vendor, Customer, Atlassian. Specifying who is responsible is important to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
2. Step: this is a single select field that groups Tasks based on the step at which they are conducted. The values are: pre-migration, migration, and post-migration

In the migration runbook, the order of tasks is critical, especially as each migration is tightly time-boxed. The wrong order can lead to technical problems or a waste of time. The team uses the rank field to order them. Adam finds that the best way to rank them properly is by using Jira roadmap. The roadmap feature provides a drag-and-drop interface and good layout of the order. This ease of use and visibility is conducive to having healthy brainstorms and scrutiny.

Surfacing their runbook on Confluence

Good customer alignment ensures there are no surprises and the migration lands where the customer needs it to land. As so much effort and thought goes into creating the perfect runbook, Adam needs to ensure he brings the Customer with him.
He looked for a way to share the runbook on Confluence.
The customer only has access to Conflunece, and no access to Jira. Despite this, Jira Snapshots for Confluence provides her a curated view to Jira data.
The runbook page on Confluence has a Jira Snapshot macro on it.
The macro is configured like this:

1. Scope to include all the Tasks in the Epic, ordered by Rank
2. The list of fields: i.e. Key, Summary, Description, Responsibility, Status
3. The issues are grouped per step. This helps to focus the attention on what's important now.

An unexpected bonus is that Jira Snapshots has a comparison option. By comparing the latest Snapshots with the previous, its clear to see what changed. Like this, reviewing the runbook modifications is very quick.

Results

Adam says: “Atlassian provides an excel template for pre-migration, migration and post-migration checklists / runbooks. My team is so used to Jira and hey, Jira is a great tool that we all love so why not use it? The impact of managing the runbook in Jira was huge. It saved us loads of time and boosted moral. With Jira snapshots for Confluence we could bridge this last gap of customer alignment. Now sharing the data with the customer is friction-less.
There is always a place to improve the tools you use, and with this configuration we are saving time every single day. If other teams out there have found more tools that can help, it will be cool if you can share them in the comments here“

[Adam Rypel _MoroSystems_]

Glad that Jira Snapshots helped us with our workflow, thanks! I am looking forward to finding more tools like this, to make our processes most effective. It's always fun to find ways how to make it better.

[Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__]

Nice, nice nice :), thank you @Adam Rypel _MoroSystems_ and the rest of the team for your effort :). I'm happy I could be at the beginning of the activity and you roll so good :)