The People Side of Cloud Migrations

As I look back on the journey my team took to get us to the cloud, many things stand out as worthy of sharing. At the top of that list are the people side challenges of the migration. If you get that wrong, nothing else matters and you will fail miserably. Anticipating questions from your team, and having answers to those questions ready, will be vital. What exactly does this migration mean? What will my team think of this migration? How can I get them on board? What can I do to help make us successful? These are just some of the questions that are critical to the success of your migration and if you get these wrong, nothing else will matter.

Start with Vision.

Where are we going and why? Paint the picture of the promised land and show how we will all get there. Share with your team the logic for the move. Maybe it's cost savings, or app elasticity, or redundancy, or access to services instead of installed software - whatever it is, be very clear about the motives behind the move.

The vision must be authentic and a part of you and your commitment that this is the right thing to do. Point out the things that you know as well the things that you don't. For the areas you don't know, ask for their help and input.

The vision needs to bleed out of you, the cloud evangelist. Your belief and commitment to the vision will exude from you in everything you do. This book helped me tremendously in leading through authenticity and I highly recommend it.

Lack of clarity is the single best way to fail at anything. Having a clear vision is the foundation for moving on to the next step.

Position Disruption as Growth.

Unless you're dealing with a "lift and shift" of an existing application, your team's world is about to change. A lot. This change is viewed as disruption and that translates to discomfort, and discomfort evolves into fear. So what do you do about it?

My job as a leader is to ensure my people have the skills that enable them to work anywhere yet provide an environment that makes them choose to work here.

A cloud migration plays nicely into this for the following reasons:

• They have big new things to do. This lends itself to the "environment that makes them choose to work here". They have new challenges that cause them to speed to work every day again. It's challenging and rewarding for all of us.
• They acquire new skills. This makes them more marketable and fits the "my people have the skills to enable them to work anywhere".

When I accurately position the cloud migration as an exciting project in which we will all obtain new skills, suddenly the disruption seems worth it, or at least more palatable. The rough edge of resistance begins to get smoothed over a little as we move on to the next step.

Education is Paramount

So now that we have a vision that we believe in and we've positioned the disruption as a positive one that makes us all better and more marketable, now we need to focus on skill acquisition. Fortunately, things are getting easier at this point since the best technical people crave working with new technologies. The question is how can they get the skills they need as economically as possible, especially when budget is limited.

My best advice here is to "get creative". We did the following things for my team that aided tremendously.

1. Encourage certification. Anyone on my team that passes a certification can expense it for 100% reimbursement. People who achieve certification are acknowledged in front of the rest of the team creating a healthy competitiveness. These certification exams are not easy and are quite an accomplishment. But more importantly, it demonstrates that they have a high technical skill level, which we will need.
2. Promote fun, internal contests. We divided our team into 5 sub-teams. The contest involved using an IoT device and creating the most useful and innovative application for it using nothing but cloud services. The teams had a month to work on this (plus all of their regular work) and presented their application to the panel of judges - most of whom worked for the cloud vendor. The judging criteria included usefulness and creativity while extra points were awarded for the more cloud services utilized. So what happened here? The team used this fun exercise to learn things on their own that they would not have otherwise. It was effective training on the cheap. It also helped that our vendor ponied up some seriously nice prizes to the first and second place teams.
3. Leverage your vendor relationships. If you haven't noticed lately, the cloud vendor wars are on. As a result, vendors are bending over backward to keep customers happy. We've asked our vendor for on-site design reviews, new tech presentations, the works. They have consistently delivered on our requests and are a collaborative partner in our journey.

It Takes Time

Change of this magnitude is not an overnight deal and these things will take some time. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy. Stay focused, keep the team on track and stick to the plan. As they say in coaching, "perfect practice makes perfect. Repetition is the key."

In summary, share your vision, position the change as growth, educate your people and then get going. You will improve with practice.