Xceed Group, the company accelerating transformational change, interviewed over one hundred senior level business, technology and financial service experts to find out their views on migration. 44% of people admitted that their migration hadn’t been satisfactory in terms of completing on time, while 40% stated that budget had been exceeded. With a third answering that migration projects had a negative impact on ‘business as usual.’

The survey was designed to understand what the impact migrations have had on organisations, as well as the most challenging aspects throughout the project process. The survey was conducted amongst 125 senior managers and heads of IT and transformation across a wide range of industry sectors, including financial services, accountancy, technology, and consulting. 90% of the respondents had personally been involved in a migration.

Only 19% of respondents rated the project timescales as ‘excellent’, and only 23% managed to stick to budget.

“We’re seeing a real trend toward putting off migration projects because of lack of confidence in being able to run a migration programme without significant impact to business critical operations,” said Xceed Group MD Paul McGolpin. “Organisations understand that migrations are necessary, but the ability to run a business and transform that business via a large-scale migration is not an easy balance to achieve. It’s a big concern because long term, delaying a migration will only have a negative impact as organisations lose out on the financial benefits that migrations are ultimately designed to deliver.”

40% of organisations cited lack of in-house resource or experience as one of the biggest obstacles to tackling a migration, with gaining project visibility (31.3%) and execution (35.5%) as the most challenging stages of the entire migration process.

67% of respondents cited communication as a critical element of migrations requiring improvement, with discovery being another area that was singled out. One respondent summarised the migration problem as “A lack of strategy really. We had not defined key goals and as such could not correctly resource or measure success.”

With 58% of survey respondents anticipating needing to do another migration in the next two years, it looks as though The Migration Conundrum will be top priority for large organisations for 2015 and beyond.

Visit Xceed Group at stand 504 at DataCentreDynamics Converged at the ExCeL Centre, London, November 19-20 to hear more about their Migration Conundrum survey.