Digital Plunge - have you already taken the plunge?

Recently I worked on one of the major enterprise project in Adobe for upgrading AEM from 5.6.1 to 6.2. It took me and my team almost 10 months to upgrade this enterprise system, due to the complexity of the project. After working on multiple upgrade projects on AEM now, I feel that even though Adobe documentation does provide lots of help, but there is still a huge difference in plan, timelines (may vary from 4 weeks to 10 months), and execution for each project (completely depends on the current architecture and topologies). I am trying to consolidate my experience and learnings on these projects in my blog. Hope it will be helpful for some of you planning for AEM upgrade I will cover each phase separately as below Kickoff, Planning & estimation Analysis/assessment/discovery workshop Actual upgradation   Post upgrade Activities Performance tuning activities Go live & Cutover Maintenance activities