What evidence should decide a migration go or no-go?

A completed deployment is only one part of a migration. Reconciliation, recovery and operational acceptance need their own evidence.

23 October 2026 · MGCA group · English

Start with the decision, then define the evidence

Before the cutover rehearsal, write down what would make the accountable owner stop the migration. A useful criterion has a measurable condition, a named owner and a deadline for obtaining evidence. Avoid criteria such as testing complete when nobody has defined what complete means.

Reconcile meaning as well as counts

Matching row counts is a useful first check, but it does not prove that balances, relationships, dates or business states survived the move. Select reconciliations that reflect the business process: totals by period, orphaned relationships, duplicate identifiers, representative transactions and the treatment of rejected records. Agree acceptable differences before the migration run.

Rehearse recovery under realistic constraints

A backup is an input to recovery. Evidence comes from restoring and validating a usable service. Rehearse the recovery path with the people who would perform it, measure elapsed time and record the point beyond which rollback becomes impractical. Include changes made after the cutover begins; otherwise the recovered system may omit business activity.

Separate technical completion from business acceptance

Technical teams can show that services are healthy and data checks passed. The business owner must still decide whether the result supports the intended work. Record both judgements, including exceptions and their owners. If one team signs for both without explicit authority, the acceptance record can conceal a gap in accountability.

Make the handover testable

Ask the operating team to demonstrate the first-day tasks: detect a failed job, identify the affected data, rerun safely, escalate a dependency and find the recovery instructions. This exposes missing access, unclear ownership and assumptions that a document review can miss.

A compact decision record

For each acceptance criterion, record the expected result, actual result, evidence link, owner and decision. At the go or no-go meeting, unresolved exceptions should be visible beside their effect on recovery and business operation. The useful output is a defensible decision, not a uniformly green status report.