Phase 3: Effort and Risk Assessment - Organizational Analysis
Organizational analysis Organizational factors will generally prevail over technical factors. Technical factors can be easily delineated and addressed. Organizational factors lie beneath the surface and can derail efforts. Seemingly small hurdles can become insurmountable if the organization is unprepared or unwilling to address them. Without a plan for addressing issues, the organization can quickly become focused on minor shortcomings and overlook major opportunities for migrating to open source. The first step in addressing organizational risk factors is to analyze organizational issues and risks. This will provide a roadmap for preparing the organization for the migration. Organizational readiness factors include. • Training and knowledge gaps • Is the staff knowledgeable about the technology or merely comfortable with existing tools? • Has the organization adopted a process for developing and deploying software? • Workload factors • Will the current staff have time to perform current workload tasks and also participate in training and migration work? • Will there be sufficient hardware to deploy and test new servers before putting them into production? • Cultural factors • Bottom-up versus top-down decision making • High quality versus low cost • Leading versus trailing edge • Budget • CAPEX versus OPEX • TCO versus ROI Red Hat Consulting Strategic Migration Planning Guide24 www.jboss.com Taking these considerations into account for the migration plan will avoid unpleasant surprises and produce a successful migration. A strength, weakness, opportunity and threats (SWOT) analysis can help define the organizational readiness. It basically helps the organization match up strengths and weakness, opportunities and threats, and then develop a plan to leverage strengths to overcome weaknesses.