Migration status is often expressed as a percentage. That can help with planning, but it does not explain whether the business is ready to trust the result. Readiness is better discussed through evidence: what has been defined, tested, accepted and assigned to an owner.
The following eight areas provide a practical structure for that conversation.
Scope and ownership
Confirm which data is moving, which is being archived and which will remain in place. Each important data domain needs a business owner who can resolve meaning, quality and acceptance questions.
Source understanding
Profile the actual sources. Document volumes, formats, relationships, duplicates, missing values and operational workarounds. A mapping based only on system documentation may miss how data is really used.
Target rules and mapping
Make transformations, defaults and exclusions reviewable by both business and technical specialists. A mapping is not complete merely because every target field has a source; its meaning and permitted values also need to be understood.
Quality decisions
Define what will be corrected, tolerated, quarantined or escalated. Not every defect requires the same response. Decisions should reflect business risk and downstream use rather than a universal idea of perfect data.
Reconciliation
Agree how completeness and accuracy will be demonstrated after each migration cycle. Counts are useful, but important financial, regulatory or operational attributes may require more specific reconciliation.
Testing and acceptance
Use representative scenarios and realistic volumes. Record who accepts the result, the evidence they will review and what happens when a threshold is missed.
Cutover and recovery
Plan dependencies, checkpoints, communications, responsible people and rollback triggers. Recovery should be tested where practical rather than remaining a document that no one has exercised.
Handover and control
Confirm how migrated data will be supported, governed and monitored after go-live. Ownership does not end when the load completes.
A useful readiness review makes uncertainty visible and assigns the next action. It does not provide a universal go-live answer; that decision belongs to the accountable owners applying the project’s own criteria.
Use the free Before the Data Moves readiness check to turn these areas into a structured team discussion.