Digital estate is an important point when it comes to planning. A digital estate is an abstract reference to a collection of tangible owned assets. In a digital estate, those assets include virtual machines (VMs), servers, applications, data, and so on. Essentially, a digital estate is the collection of IT assets that power business processes and supporting operations. The importance of a digital estate is most obvious during the planning and execution of digital transformation efforts. During transformation journeys, the cloud strategy teams use the digital estate to map the business outcomes to release plans and technical efforts. That all starts with an inventory and measurement of the digital assets that the organization owns today. After an organization understands the most important form of transformation, digital estate planning becomes much easier to manage.

Agile employees who explore and learn new cloud technologies can lead the adoption of cloud services by helping the organization understand and embrace the associated changes. A mapping of skills to IT roles in a cloud-hosted environment could look like this.

Planning for cloud adoption can be a significant change for some organizations. IT organizations have long focused on the application of linear or sequential models of project management, like the waterfall model. The replacement of acquisition cycles with an operating-expense approach helps businesses move more quickly and with smaller financial commitments. This approach helps teams to engage in projects before all requirements are well known.

A plan is only as effective as the data that’s put into it. For a cloud adoption plan to be effective, there are two categories of input: strategic and tactical. Accurate strategic inputs ensure that the work being done contributes to achievement of business outcomes. Accurate tactical inputs ensure that the work can be planned accurately and managed effectively. After the team is comfortable with the strategic inputs and the inputs for digital estate rationalization, the next step of workload prioritization can begin.