“Helena forced us to list the batch jobs that still wrote to the old identity store. We had been pretending those jobs were ‘later’. The readiness pack made later a dated wave.” The workshops ate more calendar than we budgeted in week one.
Client notes
Comments from United Kingdom teams who used our planning consultations. One note includes a reservation — workshops cost calendar even when they save cutover weekends later.
“Placement criteria stopped an endless AWS-versus-Azure argument. We scored latency and ownership, then moved on.”
“The runbook named who could abort at 02:00. That single line changed how calmly the rehearsal went.”
“Cost envelope assumptions were ugly in places, which is why finance trusted them. No polished fantasy number.”
“Monthly reviews caught a schema change that would have broken our shadow-read checks. Quiet, useful pressure.”
Extended note: Bristol identity jobs
A retail platform team asked for a readiness assessment after a pilot migration left identity half-moved. Discovery found overnight batch jobs still writing to the legacy store — jobs that did not appear on the application architecture diagram. The pack dated those jobs into wave two with dual-run checks, instead of treating them as “cleanup.” The team still executed the moves; our work was the inventory and sequencing they lacked.