Pharos Production / Review brief
Modernization Brief: Record the Work That Remains
A migration date says little about the work that will remain at cutover. Define the workload, its state and the evidence required to move responsibility to the new system.
Original editorial worksheet · Updated
- Use it for
- Scope legacy modernization, cloud migration, data engineering or an ERP/CRM integration.
- Output
- A blank, editable record with evidence fields and ownership.
- Tool behavior
- The CSV is a static download. No project details are requested or submitted.
Set the boundary before comparing
Inventory the workload and its dependencies before choosing a migration strategy. Include data producers and consumers, scheduled jobs, retry queues and operational access. A data pipeline can appear current while an old job or a slow tenant still holds unfinished work. Track those units explicitly.
Compare a retained system, a replacement and a staged extraction against the same workload boundary. Microservices introduce new interfaces and operational responsibilities. The proposal should identify which boundary justifies that change, who owns it and how the new service will be operated.
The evidence record
Use one row per review area. The role is a starting point; assign a named owner in your project. Attach a sanitized reference and retain unresolved questions until a reviewer has a supported answer.
| Review area | Evidence to attach | Suggested role |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory | Workload, dependencies and current owners | Architecture owner |
| Data state | Source snapshot, transformation and reconciliation fields | Data owner |
| Residual work | In-flight operations, backlog and continuing arrivals | Operations owner |
| Cutover | Freeze, final sync and receiving acceptance checks | Cutover owner |
| Rollback | Trigger, authoritative state and recovery procedure | Incident owner |
| Handover | Monitoring, access, runbooks and support boundary | Receiving team |
The CSV adds assigned owner, evidence reference, status, unresolved question and review date columns. Every row starts as draft.
A fictional example
A fictional migration has 20,000 queued items and receives 25 new items per second. Counting only the initial backlog understates the required work. Use the queue calculator on this site to inspect a constant-rate scenario, then validate its assumptions against the actual workload.
Use the record in a review
- Choose the work unit and list every source of continuing changes.
- Define comparison fields and the permitted explanation for each discrepancy.
- Agree cutover and rollback evidence with the receiving team.
- Recheck throughput and old-item age when the operating conditions change.
Download the blank CSV and keep the completed version with your project records.
Source and limits
The checklist is not a migration simulation. The queue calculator assumes constant rates and comparable work items. Real cutovers also depend on data quality, ordering and downstream capacity.
AWS Builders' Library: Avoiding insurmountable queue backlogs. Explains why accumulated work and new arrivals both matter during backlog recovery.
Source reviewed 9 November 2026. The suggested fields are this site's editorial method, not an external certification standard.