The riskiest sentence in a platform switch is "we’ll bring the data across later." Later never owns the problem. An institution’s records — every attendance day, every result, every transfer certificate serial — are the institution, and moving them deserves the same discipline as an examination. This checklist is that discipline, written down.
Before anything moves
- Inventory the source: every table, every module, row counts recorded. You cannot verify what you never counted.
- Classify: what maps to the new platform, what is obsolete, what needs an owner’s decision. Insist on seeing the "does not map" list — silence there is where records disappear.
- Freeze a copy: migrations rehearse against copies; the live system keeps running.
The dry run is not optional
A dry run executes the entire migration against a disposable target and compares the outcome to the source: the same number of students, the same attendance records per year, the same marks per exam. Whatever tooling a vendor uses internally, what you are owed is the comparison — counts, side by side, before cutover is scheduled. A vendor who resists a dry run is telling you how the real run will go.
Cutover night, boring by design
- Scheduled at a natural boundary — a weekend or session break — after parity was already proven on the rehearsal.
- Module order matters: structure before students, students before attendance, attendance before analytics.
- The legacy system is not switched off; it is left intact, read-only, as the fallback until you decide otherwise.
- The final parity report is delivered and filed — the document that ends future "did we lose anything?" conversations before they start.
The week after
Spot-check like an auditor, not like a proud parent: pick ten students across eras and trace them — sections per session, attendance in a chosen month, a marksheet reprint against the filed original. Then run the new system’s reports for a period the old system also covered and compare totals. Ten minutes of adversarial checking buys years of confidence.
Institutions that follow this list describe their migrations with the highest compliment available for infrastructure work: nothing happened. The records came, the counts agreed, and Monday was ordinary.