Understanding Business Needs

Section 2: Business Requirements and Data Analysis. Lesson 6.

Understanding the business is the first and most important activity in any migration.

Core rule: a data migration never starts with the technology. You don't just take data from business A and push it into system B. First you understand business A: its structure, goals, processes and constraints. Then you decide whether the new system fits, and whether the migration could cause harm or disruption.

If the team doesn't understand the organisation's objectives, the project can technically succeed (the data moved) and still fail to deliver business value.

Running example: a car-care business

The lecture uses a real small business found by searching "Car Wash UK": Platinum PPF, a car detailing and paint protection film (PPF) provider. Its website lists services, contact details and customer reviews.

Scenario: the owner wants every accumulated review migrated safely to a new website, an external review or survey platform, or a separate database. Before touching any data, we need to understand:

Where the business operates and how far it reaches
What services it provides
Its main goals (for example, reviews drive new bookings)
Who to contact, and who owns the website and its data

Only then can we work out the technical requirements.

Stakeholders

Migration needs close collaboration across roles, and each group has different expectations:

Business owner: business value, continuity, customer trust
IT executives: cost savings, long-term strategy, risk
Business managers: processes keep running with minimal disruption
Compliance officers: legal and regulatory standards (for example GDPR for customer reviews with names)
Web or back-end developers: source systems, code, database access
End users: usability and performance after the move

The migration team must gather and consolidate all of these requirements, and resolve conflicts between them (for example, "cheapest" against "zero downtime").

Defining the migration scope

Scope sets the boundaries for the technical work. Not all data needs to move:

Active business data: migrate
Old historical records: archive (kept for reference or compliance, but not loaded)
Obsolete or duplicate data: often retire

Business priorities decide which data is critical, which processes must stay operational during the transition, and how much downtime management will accept. Scope also covers what is explicitly out of scope, which prevents scope creep later.

The requirements workflow

text

Identify business problem
        ↓
Identify stakeholders
        ↓
Stakeholder interviews → document current processes & objectives
        ↓
Draft migration scope
        ↓
Define success criteria (measurable)
        ↓
Approval → Migration

Applied to the example:

Problem: customer reviews have no backup.
Stakeholders: use the website's contact page to reach the owner. Ask whether a database or backup exists. If not, get the lead developer's contact details.
Interviews: how are reviews stored now (CMS, plugin, Google reviews embed)? Who adds or moderates them? What must be preserved (text, rating, author, date, photos)?
Scope: all published reviews and their metadata; exclude spam or unapproved reviews.
Success criteria: for example, 100% of published reviews in the target, with ratings, authors and dates matching the source, verified by count and a sample check, and no website downtime.
Approval, then migrate.

Good success criteria are measurable

Record counts match (source equals target, rejected records explained)
Zero critical data errors in a validation sample
Downtime within the agreed window (for example under 2 hours)
Key reports or pages work in the new system
Sign-off from the business owner

Finding the root cause

How does anyone know that a problem like "no review backup" exists? By understanding the business, analysing how it works day to day, and tracing issues back to their root cause.

A layman's fix is "just back up the reviews". The professional approach traces the data back to its origin: here, the review section of the Platinum PPF website is the actual data source. Techniques such as the 5 Whys help. For example: why is there no backup? Because reviews live only in a third-party widget. Why? Because nobody owns the data. And so on.

Source and target

Every migration comes down to two components: