Overview
When defining the overall scope of your Nintex Automation Cloud migration initiative, one key factor to consider will be prioritization. Whether you are planning for a Nintex Upgrade Center-led migration effort, or a self-service migration path, or even a hybrid approach, prioritizing your inventory of workflows to be moved into Nintex Automation Cloud ensures that the most important workflows are covered first. And, for Upgrade Center-led engagements, prioritizing your workflows maximizes the value of the migration assistance hours by focusing the Nintex delivery team’s efforts on your most critical business processes within the hours available.
Prioritization Best Practices
When planning for your migration, several potential factors should be considered in the workflow prioritization process, including:
- Business Grouping
- UAT Testing Base
- Workflow Dependencies
- Action Counts & Complexity
- Frequency of Execution
- Cleanup
Business Grouping
Workflows that serve a particular business unit or team, or that are shared across multiple SharePoint sites, can be grouped together for the purposes of prioritization. Grouping workflows by business function also makes it easier to manage UAT activities, as the same user base can often test the migrated workflows end-to-end without reliance on other teams.
UAT Testing Base
Within the applicable business groupings, availability and/or preferred timeframes for targeted UAT testers can also factor into the prioritization. Knowing the target schedule for UAT users to execute their testing can impact the overall project plan and prioritization decisions on which workflows to tackle first, versus which ones to hold for a later date.
Workflow Dependencies
Within the business groupings, those workflows that are dependent on other workflows should also be included in the prioritization. Specifically, look for any component workflows that run within a targeted parent workflow, as those component workflows need to be upgraded before the primary workflow can reference them. And component workflows that are referenced or shared by multiple other parent workflows should also be taken into consideration.
Action Counts and Complexity
The workflow inventory will provide a total count on the number of actions within each workflow. Generally speaking, the higher the number of actions and/or the more complex the logic in each workflow, the longer the upgrade and remediation process will take in Nintex Automation Cloud. Consider prioritizing smaller, less complex workflows to get started. This will help generate some quick wins in the short term and will also help the Nintex Upgrade Center resources become more familiar with the workflows in general, helping drive efficiency when migrating other workflows in the same business grouping. Smaller workflows also allow your internal teams to get comfortable with the upgrade tooling before moving onto more complex workflows in a self-service scenario.
Frequency of Execution
Another factor to consider when prioritizing is the frequency or total number of times that a given workflow has executed. Individual workflows reflecting a high volume of executions in the inventory can indicate business-critical processes that would be good candidates for prioritization. Conversely, workflows that run infrequently or only periodically (e.g., quarterly or annually) could be lower priorities, as there may be ample time to migrate them before the next planned execution.
Cleanup
The prioritization process also provides a good opportunity to clean up your workflow inventory in general. For example, outdated workflows, prior versions, workflows that have not run in over a year or two, those no longer in use, etc., can be removed from your migration scope altogether, as there’s no need to expend time or effort to move workflows no longer needed by your organization.
Additional Resources