Get those teams together

Once you have your plan together, including whether migration is in the cards, you need to put together your teams. As we mentioned in So, what's in those applications?, your teams should be set up with the work units in mind. Skill levels, familiarity with the application, knowledge of subsystems used -- all the usual criteria -- must be considered. For migration work, it will be fairly much business as usual. But for the year 2000 work, you will need to orient the teams to the problem -- and the solution. They will need a firm understanding of what the problem is (you do not want them mired in myths), what your goals are, and how, exactly, you intend to get there.

This is business as usual in the sense that it is purely a programming problem. But it is also a daunting and unglamorous task, yet a possibly vital one. Ensure that all team members understand needed concepts (bridging or windowing, for example) and where and how they are to be applied, the scope of each work unit, and the timing and coordination with other changes ( interfacing) and partitions.

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