Confessions
of a data migration dummy
I remain forever grateful to a Data Centre Team
Leader who helped me understand data migration.
“Janet”
he said “the data has to have a home to go to”.
And at that moment I finally got it. Before that I had been going to meetings,
reading documents and simply not understanding what people were talking about. Asking questions just created more confusion. My role
at the time was change support for a Data Centre during and after a major
migration exercise, so I really needed to understand this, what would happen and
who and what would be affected so I could communicate this to others and help everyone
get ready.
What the Team Leader did was what we often have to do in IT
projects – use a metaphor or analogy to get a point across. For me, the main barrier to understanding migration
was the limitation of my own mental models. So when the team leader talked
about the data finding a home, this bought forward an image of many different
houses and their contents moving to a large apartment block. So
from thinking about this I understood how migration happened, why clean data
was important, and why care and attention that had to be given to timing and managing
business continuity risk.
Catering for different mental models is nothing new in IT
projects. Whatever our speciality we all
need to understand who and what we are dealing with and pay attention to the
language we use. From time to time, I notice the tendency to feign understanding
and not ask questions for fear of looking ignorant. I prefer tolerate the eye rolling reaction
to an admission of ignorance simply because the explanation is important to me
and the people I work with. I wonder sometimes what George Orwell would make of the language
of IT.
I think that he would like the precision
and clarity of some technology terms but would be quite dismissive of words or expressions
that mean nothing. When communicating IT concepts or complex
project management processes, we all need to be good communicators who think
about the audience. This is especially so
for cloud deployments which come with new concepts and language that take time
to grasp.
A good rule of thumb is this. If you don’t understand it yourself, you won’t
be able to explain it to others. And if stakeholders don’t understand you – in
time they will disengage – which is a major risk for projects who need engaged stakeholders
to be successful.
Nothing is lost by asking the question – but a lot can be
gained from making the effort to understand something new.
Senior Consultant - Information Professionals
Janet is a storied, qualified, change management professional, with many years of both commercial and government based experience.
You can connect with or find out more about Janet on linkedin: au.linkedin.com/pub/janet-crews/6/900/907
Really valid point within an Industry that changes so quickly, is full of jargon, acronyms and some abstract models to just put your hand up and say "could you clarify that..." or "does that acronym actually mean...". Better to be on the same page than in another book altogether!
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