Migration Runbook — Under 100 People

Purpose

At this size, data migrations happen regularly — you're outgrowing the tool you picked 18 months ago. Typical migrations: QuickBooks → NetSuite as revenue grows; HubSpot → Salesforce for sales complexity; Intercom → Zendesk for support scale; Pipedrive → HubSpot for marketing integration; Google Workspace → Microsoft 365 (or vice versa).

The runbook isn't enterprise-scale complexity — it's a pragmatic checklist that prevents data loss, customer disruption, and post-migration panic. One document. Maybe 10–30 records of "this happened when." Single engineer or ops person typically executes.

When to Use

• Moving customer data, financial data, or employee data between systems
• Switching core-business SaaS (CRM, accounting, helpdesk, HR)
• Consolidating tools (e.g., two CRMs → one)

Not every data move needs a runbook. Moving a team's Notion docs from one workspace to another = skip. Moving AP history from QBO to NetSuite = definitely runbook.

Structure

The runbook has 6 phases: Plan → Extract → Transform → Load → Validate → Cutover → Decommission. At this scale, phases 1–4 might take 1–4 weeks; cutover is often a weekend; decommission is 30–90 days of keeping old system read-only.