A cloud migration asks your best engineers to do two full-time jobs at once: keep the current systems running and rebuild them somewhere new. Something has to give, and usually it's the migration — pushed a quarter at a time until it quietly becomes a permanent "someday."
The teams that finish migrations on schedule solve the capacity problem deliberately. Here's how.
Separate "run" from "change"
Your existing team knows your systems better than anyone — which is exactly why pulling them fully onto the migration breaks day-to-day operations. Keep a core group focused on running the business, and staff the migration itself with specialists who've done this specific lift before. The knowledge transfer flows both ways, and nothing on fire gets ignored.
Bring in people who've made this move
A first-time migration is a series of expensive lessons. Engineers who've migrated similar workloads carry the patterns, the pitfalls and the shortcuts. That experience is the difference between a six-month project and an eighteen-month one, and it's precisely the kind of capability you don't need permanently.
Size the team to the phases
Migrations aren't uniform. The discovery and design phase needs senior architects; the execution phase needs hands-on builders; the stabilisation phase needs reliability specialists. Staffing all of them for the whole timeline wastes money; staffing none of them in advance wastes time. Match the profile to the phase.
Protect the knowledge on the way out
The goal isn't just a migrated system — it's a team that can run it confidently once the specialists roll off. Build handover into the plan from day one: documentation, pairing and shared ownership, so the capability stays after the contract ends.
Cloud migrations don't stall because the technology is impossible. They stall because the people who could do it are already busy. Solve the capacity problem and the migration stops being "someday."
If a migration keeps slipping, let's staff it properly.