Application Interview Best Practices

Goals

The goals of the interview process are:

• Rank the prioritization of applications for transformation.
• Determine transition types for each application (Tidal can provide recommendations based on the interview too).
• Provide relevant information for the cloud architect.
• Migration planning based on grouping, affinity, integrations and business impact (user communities).

Best practices:

• Identify business owners, early. It can be hard to find them, the sooner you do the easier it is to build a relationship with them.
• Schedule interviews early, it takes time to find a time that works for everyone, the earlier you schedule the less likely it delays your assessment. It is best to identify and ensure the one decision maker is present. Sometimes there are multiple, but getting ownership from one improves the project going forward. This person often becomes the Product Owner in any Refactor migrations.
• Share all the interview questions with the attendees 1-2 days before, so they can come prepared.
• Keep them scheduled short, 30 minutes or less. People’s time is valuable and no one ever claims to have extra time. The shorter the easier it is the schedule sooner, and the better odds of getting the right people present.
• Its okay if you don’t get all the answers during the interview, identify items to follow up on.
• For questions with numerical answers, aim for order of magnitude accuracy. ie. Is the answer 1, 10, 100 or 1000 is the level of accuracy needed.
• Inform the business owner of the project and how it will impact them.
• Record the interview, to allow easy and accurate reference for the remainder of the project.
• If applicable (i.e. for applications with GUIs) identify someone to provide a user-walk through of how they use the application today. Record this session as well.