so if you're a business analyst working on a data migration project then this video is for you hi I'm sashina menel I'm the founder of business analysis Hub the fastest growing community of business analysts here in India in this video I am going to give you the step-by-step process in which you can capture data migration requirements and document that but before we dive in hit the notification Bell and click on the Subscribe button to receive many more videos like this so let's get started foreign so the key challenge that business analysts face in data migration projects is there is no user interface without a user interface they struggle to understand how exactly these requirements have to be documented the functional requirement document talks about having user interfaces and Screen mockups which illustrate what exactly should be added in the screen but in the absence of these screens how can you capture these requirements and documented let's have a look at it so in a data migration project the first step that you need to do is data analysis please note there are a lot of tools available for data analysis but in this video we are using the manual approach okay so in the absence of tools how you will manually do a data analysis and write a data migration requirement that's what we'll see in this video so the first step data analysis what do we do in the data analysis we try to figure out what are the data discrepancies if there are any bad if there is any bad data or some missing data what do I mean by that in couple of projects we found that the previous version of the application did not have much validations on the screen due to which a lot of bad data had got accumulated in the back end which means the business users used to avoid entering data in several Fields some of the fields were very important very key Fields but those fields did not have validations so it was allowed for the business users to leave those fields blank then there were also some fields which had junk data in it because they were mandatory fields and business users did not have the related data they added some junk data and just saved it in the database okay so that's the bad data bad data means any junk data which is not meaningful data goes into the database that's classified as a bad data many of the fields many of the important crucial Fields were left blank because the previous version of the application did not have adequate validations so you need to do an in-depth data analysis to understand if there is any a data mismatch or bad data or missing data once you have collated that information your next step will be to discuss your findings with the customer okay now when you discuss these findings with the customer the customer might advise you to delete some of the records that are having bad data or he might say replace some of the old values with the new values that he gives you and in some cases add new values to the missing data to the blank Fields okay so you might take various approach to different fields that are having bad data or missing data and you are supposed to collate all that information in the requirement Gathering session once you have collated all of that information your next step will be to create a data mapping table what is the data mapping table data mapping table gives you enough Clarity on uh what exactly is the source data that has to be modified and what will be the new Target data that has to be injected now data mapping table can also include business rules which will tell you technical team how they can modify large data sets Okay so for example uh if you want all records belonging to which are having region as Europe replace it replace the contact person as John so your um Tech Team can write a script and do a bulk update of all the record sets that are that are belonging to the Europe region similarly another example all records where business unit is AMG or TSS replace it with IB this was a case where one of our customers there were two business units that were getting merged okay so um one business unit was the AMG the other one was TSS and they were getting merged into one business unit as IB and all the records belonging to AMG and TSS now had to be tagged to IB so we did a bulk update of these records so your data mapping table can include all of this information wherever you want a bulk update bulk delete you can include business rules so if you belong to my community you might be having access to the functional requirement specs template so in the function requirements specs template the overall template Remains the Same guys you just need to modify the functional requirement part of it where instead of functional requirement you will indicate data migration requirement and introduce this data mapping table which will tell your technical team exactly what to modify now besides these if your technical team also needs some technical information to be included in that document you can ask them what kind of technical information they are seeking and accordingly add a separate section or for that in the requirements document many times data mapping table we also include the The Source data format and the target data format okay so whether it's a numeric field character field that might be also some information that your Tech Team requires so check with your Tech Team guys what are the um additional information that they require for migration and accordingly you can modify your data mapping table to include some additional elements now some of the widely used techniques which I have used in data migration projects and which have come very handy to me are as follows number one interview you can have an interview session with your stakeholder to understand which data has to be replaced and which has to be deleted uh so interviews very effective in understanding what are their data migration requirements you can have workshops or brainstorming sessions where uh a complex data migration um is going to happen you know where um the business users themselves don't have Clarity how to modify what kind of business rules to apply so you can bring the stakeholders together in a workshop and conduct a brainstorming session where you can show them your findings um in terms of the data analysis report of your data analysis data evaluation and ask them that how to replace these kind of discrepancies so the teams can brainstorm amongst themselves and figure out a way in which they can either modify or delete these kind of Records so workshops and brainstormings come very handy when you are dealing with a complex data migration and there are several business units involved so definitely use these to take techniques if there are several business units involved interface analysis of course if we if you are in a data migration project you would like to know which interfaces have to be modified what is the format of those interfaces so interface analysis helps you understand the data interfaces if the same data is being used by an upstream application or a downstream application interface analysis helps you understand how the data is being passed across different applications in the organization so you can take a note of that during data migration very important guys whenever you are doing a data migration always try to understand whether the current database is interfacing with what kind of application never focus on one single application because the data set or the database might be used across different applications so you need to know interface analysis helps you outline what exactly are the applications are who are using the data business rules analysis very very important I just gave you an example of how you can create your own business rules to modify or delete the data so create those business rules because you are a tech team can then understand these rules in a better way a decision trees I have used decision trees extensively when I had to um show if else kind of a condition you know like for example if the customer's age is more than 18 years then he is like eligible for a loan so change the data value of this particular field like for example if you want to show that a value in a particular field has to be changed based on a particular condition then using decision tree comes very handy you can show a conditional flow using a decision tree okay so these are some of the techniques that come very handy in data migration projects uh understand guys data migration projects are just like like the other normal projects except for the difference being that we don't have user interfaces here we are actually dealing with data over here okay because students do not see the application the actual user interfaces they get very confused when they are deployed in data migration projects and they do not know how to go about capturing requirements but understand in a data migration project everything revolves from the data okay so if you understand the format of the data and what's a business rule that has to be applied to modify that particular data you can win the game so that's all in today's video about data migration I hope this video has helped you if you have understood how to write data migration requirement put in the comment box below three takeaways from this video that's all for now keep watching thank you thank you