As part of our Migration Moments series, TDS Migration Consultant Dave Boudreau shares a real world example of how tabletop exercises can ensure the success of your Data Center Migration.
A tabletop event is a rehearsal or practice for the real day event. One way that a tabletop can help us prepare or uncover issues that we hadn’t planned on, is we’re going through the actual runbook event day steps with the people who are going to execute those actual tasks. Actually, I’ve just did one today. We uncovered that the person we had assigned to task to had moved on to another position within the company. So they will no longer be assigned to that task.
There’s a few reasons that’s a big deal. It could increase the risk. It could shut the entire event down until we determine a safer way to move forward. The other thing that can be uncovered during a tabletop event would be steps in the runbook. We’ve determined a migration method prior to this event and it may be that something has changed, or the person who provided the initial migration method, they could have provided some wrong information, things that just need to be updated. We may be able to combine steps to shrink the runbook and make things a little leaner. All of these things help us eliminate potential risks that weren’t foreseen ahead of time so that we’re not dealing with those on the event day.