SYMPTOM 01
The plan is fiction
Estimates are made against a system nobody fully understands, so the plan starts wrong and drifts further every week.
// I start by building.
Migration Factory
Big migrations rarely fail because nobody could write the code. They fail because nobody can prove what is actually finished.
Migration Factory is a delivery system for moving legacy systems. It turns an uncertain estate into small, bounded jobs, has every job checked by someone other than whoever built it, and reports progress honestly at every stage.
- BOUNDED Work is small enough to finish and to verify.
- PROVEN Builders never sign off their own work.
- HONEST Done has levels, and they are never merged into one.
The problem, stated plainly
SYMPTOM 02
Done means nothing
Code generated, branch merged, ticket closed — none of these prove the capability actually moved, or that anyone accepted it.
SYMPTOM 03
Nothing is reproducible
Six months later, nobody can show what was migrated, from which version, checked by whom, against which rules.
Migration Factory is built around one refusal: work is not finished because something was produced. It is finished when it has been independently checked, formally accepted, and recorded with its evidence.
How it works — five steps
The full method has more moving parts. This is the shape of it.
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01
Frame
Agree what is moving, from which exact version, to what target, and who is allowed to say yes. One starting line that everyone shares.
OUTCOME An agreed scope with a named decision owner.
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02
Discover
Turn unknowns into a real list of jobs. Discovery is its own activity with its own budget — not delivery work that has stalled.
OUTCOME Work understood well enough to plan.
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03
Build
Each job goes out as a bounded brief with a fixed scope and budget. Workers — human or agent — take one job at a time in an isolated workspace.
OUTCOME A change, plus the evidence that produced it.
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04
Prove
Someone independent runs the checks against the brief and either accepts or rejects it. Whoever built it cannot be the one who accepts it.
OUTCOME Accepted work, not merely written work.
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05
Land
Merge through normal source control, release when authorised, hand over ownership, retire the old system. Each of those is a separate recorded fact.
OUTCOME A migration you can audit, repeat and defend.
When discovery finds new scope, it is added in the open and the plan is revalued. Nothing is quietly dropped, and history is never rewritten to look tidier than it was.
What done actually means
Most programmes report one status. Migration Factory reports five, and never collapses them.
- ACCEPTEDIndependently checked against the brief, and formally accepted.
- INTEGRATEDMerged into the real baseline through ordinary review and CI.
- RELEASEDDeployed or otherwise released into its intended environment.
- HANDED OVERTechnical, data, security and business ownership has moved to the target.
- RETIREDThe old capability is stable to switch off, and authorised for retirement.
If a programme has reached integrated, you will be told integrated. That is the entire point.
What you get out of it
A status you can trust
Delivery state comes from acceptance records rather than optimism in a spreadsheet. Bad news arrives early, while it is still cheap.
An audit trail that outlives the programme
Every accepted change ties back to a brief, an exact source version, the checks that ran, and the authority that accepted it.
Repeatable work instead of heroics
Migration shapes that keep recurring become reusable patterns — and are withdrawn when they stop paying for themselves.
Automation with a human steering
Agents execute bounded work quickly. Humans keep scope, acceptance and production authority. Speed without handing over control.
STATE: HONEST
What it is not
Not a coding assistant, not a dashboard, and not a claim that migration becomes push-button. It is a way of running migration work so that what is finished is genuinely finished — and everything else stays visible.
Start a conversation
Tell me what you are moving and what is making it hard. You will get a straight answer about whether this approach fits — including when it does not.