Application Portfolio Rationalization for Cloud Migration

How to run a an workload/app migration discovery workshop 

1. Goals (Technical and Business) for the program > (Objectives & Key Results) for the session
2. Start at the portfolio level. Figure out how may high level portfolio’s exist.
3. For each portfolio figure out the high level buckets of apps. case in point - JavaEE apps, .NET apps, Spring Apps, PHP/Python/NodeJS …. you should create a heat map of the portfolio with the buckets. Each tile in the heat map represents a bucket and the color + intensity shows the ease of migration. The size of the tile represents the % in the portfolio. 
4. Now you have two choices go broad or go deep. i.e. look at one bucket and dig deeper or go broad and sample a couple from each bucket.
5. Settle on a couple of specific apps to start with to drill down throughout the process
   Apply business value and other org heuristics to prioritize the apps in terms of business ROI. 2 * 2 matrix of technical effort vs business value to determine focus. This can be done at the bucket level or individual app level. For individual apps run a brief SNAP to get an idea of cloud suitability. Customized SNAP with Heat maps is the way to go … so low tech way of doing this is to do this on a flipchart with Blue grid easel pads like or go with excel
6. What is the smallest possible thing we could do to add value. Discussion of MVPs. What will a potential AppTx engagement look like. How will we measure success and elicit feedback.
7. If they you are stuck in the paralysis part then do a path to production or value stream exercise to figure out what is the top constraint/problem you need to focus ON in addition to the apps
8. Retrospective & Next Steps

credit to Felicia Schwartz who developed this model ...

Bucketing and Technical Suitability of Applications

Application Migration Heatmap

Rohit Kelapure