The DoD often faces the challenge of migrating from legacy systems to new target systems. Such migration efforts represent a complex engineering problem. These efforts call for a migration plan to supplement the development plan. The migration plan addresses issues associated with phasing out legacy systems and moving to the new system. These issues include user interface compatibility, database compatibility, transition support, system interface compatibility, and training. By producing and implementing a migration plan, a development organization can help a user community make the transition in an orderly fashion.

This note describes migration planning, identifies influencing factors, outlines a set of migration planning activities, and offers a set of guidelines for the migration planning process.