Phase 3: Determining your readiness for Splunk Cloud Platform migration

Defining migration value proposition

Going one level deeper into the cloud vision, define the value of the cloud migration for the different functions in your organization (e.g., Finance, IT, Operations etc.) and the impacted users. This gives a clear picture of how to communicate and enable the benefits of the migration to help drive support and adoption.

A good value proposition is concise, measurable, aligns to well-known pain points for a team or stakeholder and has been validated by them.

Cloud migration team staffing plan

Proactive workforce planning can help you take care of your people while maintaining-- and often improving-- service levels and the kinds of value you can deliver for your business. 

A good staffing plan ensures you have the support you need to be successful. Use the Meet the Team guide as you create your staffing plan.

Developing and executing communications plan

A solid communications plan will help:

• Generate excitement about the cloud migration.
• Cascade messages through local leadership and people managers in an appropriate cadence.
• Align expectations & efforts to a common goal.
• Build trust and allow you to celebrate wins.
• Help users understand how the migration impacts their work.
• Reduce risks due to lack of alignment and adoption.

A good communication plan has:

• Content that is timely, customized and tailored to the audience. Content should be useful and should equip employees with the tools and capabilities they need .
• Delivery through existing communications vehicles (newsletters, posters, websites, digital banners--- whichever vehicles are established and trusted at your organization).
• Messaging that explains what to expect, what will be /available and when, and extends an invitation for open and transparent feedback via bidirectional communications.

Post-migration staffing transition plan

You can expect a significant reduction in time and effort applied to infrastructure management and maintenance tasks once transitioned to Splunk Cloud Platform. This provides the opportunity to transition team members to other roles and responsibilities that will contribute to improving your business customer’s use, experience and value.

Splunk offers a series of activities, including formal training paths, on-demand services, skills workshops, to support your team as they transition duties.

What does good look like?

There are typically a couple of options for deploying the talents, skills, and energies of your team after you have migrated to Splunk Cloud Platform. Here are the basic “flavors” of what we typically see:

• Value steward: With a reduced effort to maintain the environment/infrastructure, our most successful clients make a shift and move further into the role of “trusted business advisor” for the business customers. Rather than focusing on keeping the system operating, they find time to focus more on the business value they are able to derive from their data by working with the business to identify these opportunities.

• Platform optimizer: Admins who have more bandwidth can work on optimizing the new cloud platform by improving the timeliness and accuracy of data through activities such as data ingest efficiency, workload management and monitoring platform health.

• Redeployment: Many of our customers’ administration teams are supporting a variety of applications and technologies. For them, moving to Splunk Cloud Platform, provides the opportunity to redeploy resources using the same roles and responsibilities to other technologies.

• Deep thinking/Reflection/Recovery: Some of our customers are so busy with their daily commitments that they find it most useful to use the added bandwidth to carve out a bit more time in their days for deep thinking, planning, reflection, and recovery, which can be a great use of the time as well.