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Kick off, Planning & estimation for an AEM upgrade project




  1. Kick off, Planning & estimation
    1. On-site Kick off is required in upgrade project as well as any other. Purpose of this session is to
      • Introduce the team
      • Establish project goals, deliverables and timelines
      • Gather all architectural, repository and other information that my impact upgrade here
      • Introduce project methodology and Agile practices
      • Give an overview of what will be done during the Discovery phase
      • Present the agenda for the Discovery Workshops
      • Present the Project Communication Plan
      • Present next steps
    2. Upgrade projects normally doesn’t need long plans. However, if there is a structural change between versions, you better be careful :)
    3. Same is the case, if you are planning to upgrade from 5.x to 6.x of AEM. CRX structure has completely changed from 5.x (CRX2 TarPM) to 6.x (CRX3 TarMK), hence a careful planning is needed here as well
    4. If you are using version 5.4 or newer, you can plan to upgrade to AEM 6.2 directly. If you are using version 5.3 you need to plan to upgrade to AEM 6.0 first, and then to 6.2. I will take the case of 5.6.1 to 6.2 since I did it recently for an enterprise project.
    5. Estimation for upgrade project is very tricky and in my opinion it should either be delayed till assessment phase (next phase) is finished or give  estimation with categorization (no complexity, medium complexity and high complexity). The project I worked with will fall under high complexity.
    6. Planning has multiple dimension for upgrade and each dimension needs to be planned carefully as below -
      1. Kick off planning - its important to ask right questions in the kick off to measure if the upgrade is going to have low, medium or high complexity, which in turn will drive efforts.
      2. Assessment/discovery planning - assessment planning is the key to successful upgrade. All the discovery in this phase is going drive all next phases
      3. Upgrade planning - eventhough Adobe docs has full list of activity to plan your upgrade, but its important that you develop a plan according to your project architecture and requirements.
      4. Cutover planning - cutover planning is another important planner for successful upgrade project. For our case, there was hardly 8 hours of shutdown available to migrate content from all 7 instances and do the cutover.
      5. Environment tracker - if your project does not involve managed services, its important that you plan environments topology and setup (DTAP)  properly
      6. Post upgrade and maintenance activities planning
    7. References
      1. https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/deploy/upgrade/planning.html
      2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/aem-61-upgrade-lessons-learned-seth-glazer
      3. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/upgrade-aem-61-learnings-kunal-gaba
      4. http://www.icidigital.com/blog/upgrading-aem-6-1/
      5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46QnKgfWI6E

I will post my experience on Analysis/assessment/discovery workshop next



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