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Technology migrations are never easy, but rigorously managing the project scope is essential to building confidence in any migration project.

Switching technology platforms always seems like a good idea at the time. Yet, almost half of all migration projects are judged to be failures. The numbers vary, but according to some sources up to 40% of migration projects are aborted. Many more are delivered significantly over budget. Delays to the launch date are so common that they're almost expected at this point.

It doesn't matter how complex a migration is. Nothing goes to plan, regardless of whether you're changing the CMS used by a small website or migrating CRM or ERP systems to the cloud. The rare projects that do launch on time, are typically delivered with so many bugs that they're basically unusable.

All too often, delays and cost overruns are caused by poor planning at the start of the project. I've seen many CRM implementations that didn't include data migration in the scope, or marketing automation roll outs that decided migration of existing campaigns wasn't a requirement until a few weeks before launch. It's fine to exclude non-essential items from the scope of a project, but make sure that all stakeholders are onboard with everything that won't be delivered in a project as well as everything that will.

Where an item is ruled as out of scope, make sure that stakeholders have alternative ways of that meeting the relevant requirement. It's totally fine to push low priority requirements to phase 2, but only if they have another method for meeting the same business need in the interim. If you don't, then it will suddenly become a crisis when you least expect.

You don't have to solve for every business need in every project, but stakeholders will have a lot more confidence in your solution if you can direct discussion on out-of-scope requirements to alternative teams in the business. Users will start losing confidence in your ability to deliver, if there's a requirement that can't be solved by any existing solution in the business.

People will accept temporary work-arounds. For instance, it's fairly common to say that reporting won't be available at launch. Most marketers will accept a response of 'do it in excel', so long as it's not the long-term solution. However, that doesn't remove the need to measure performance. Work-arounds for the missing reports need to be considered during the design stage, rather than waiting until go live. Just make sure that the scope and frequency of those reports is clear, before finalising the project plan.