Skip to main content

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



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A case for 'strategy' in Digital Strategy...

I recently finished a book named 'Digital Strategy' by Alexander Rauser. Alexander has given current day problems during any Digital transformation and pragmatic solutions for that. Having worked in the IT industry for 17 years and last 10 years mostly into Digital Transformations for most of the fortune 500 companies, it was quite relevant to me. If you are also part of any digital transformation of any organization in any capacity, you will find it helpful too. Over the last decade, companies have thought of digital strategy as a means to market new technology or recognize upcoming trends. However, today few of those companies do realize that Digital Strategy is all about continuously improving your business to stay ahead in the curve, but some are still stuck in the old mindset. It's surprising to see  'Strategy' is missing from the Digital Strategy for many of the transformations happening, rather the focus is just on 'Marketing' (Digital Marketing...
Post a Comment
Read more

Some SDL Tridion Interview Questions…

Many of my friends keep asking me to provide some interview questions related with SDL Tridion . Surprisingly, there are hardly any site available for questions related with SDL Tridion., though you can find host of sites for other WCMs like AEM and Sitecore. Hence, I thought to put some basic Tridion related questions on the basis of my experience with it. I know it may require several improvements but thought to share something for someone who is looking to get some Tridion related questions to start with. I will be glad to incorporate any suggestion you have. Development phases related questions - What is the development methodology recommended by SDL for development/integration based on SDL Tridion? Have you participated in any Blueprinting workshop, please share the experience? What are the inputs required in BluePrint? How can inheritance of content flow be altered explicitly? What are priority and ranking in Blueprint? What are the inputs required for Content Modeling ...
6 comments
Read more

Why Digital transformation are harder to execute for Europe than US?

  I found some stark differences of working style in both the regions’ people. Most of the Indian IT companies are trying to consolidate their position in Europe after a level of saturation in US, UK, Australia and other English speaking countries, and probably most of them are struggling in Europe, though they executed projects for English speaking countries. Most of the projects including Digital Transformations even I got to chance to work on in my career were for US based customers. However, recently I got chance to work with some European giants. I thought to share my learnings & experiences after directly working with some of the big European accounts. Communication barrier - As I pointed above, Indian IT companies succeeded for most part in English speaking countries, in executing the project to completion. One of the prominent reason I think is since English is sort of primary language for all Indian companies. However, for most of the European countries English is ...
Post a Comment
Read more