Job Scheduling might not be as complicated in a technology sense as Discovery and Assessment, but because it involves coordinating people and their functions, it can be more challenging. Job Scheduling during a migration is important because, according to our running metaphor, showing up to your new location without furniture having arrived is no fun. As a function of available tools for migration, Job Scheduling may or may not be present. Whether or not Job Scheduling requires an entirely separate tool, manual processes or a combination thereof, it must be governed by the migration COE. Job Scheduling begins the process of migration because, ideally, agreement has been reached with the application owner regarding the inventory collected in the Discovery and Assessment phase. Other criteria, such as cutover window, recovery point objective (RPO), and target performance expectations, must be mutually agreed on as well.

Many parties must coordinate to prepare the readiness of the migration infrastructure with the readiness of the target infrastructure that will host the application and facilitate its dependencies. Therefore, the migration COE must prescribe governance with entitlements and workflow. Because there are self-service capabilities for customers to migrate applications in an ad-hoc fashion, coordination is required for sustaining performance when a large number of jobs are requested so as not to over-utilize available resources during the migration window.

Typically, after provider provisioning of target and migration resources is optimized, migration is bound by human capacity. Therefore, coordinating labor-intensive tasks is critical for anyone directing or participating. Looking at the broader workflow discussed in this section, there is Application Verification, which can have automated components where available but likely consists of application owners and end-user populations that validate that the application is behaving as expected in the new environment. Because there can be Discovery and Assessment, Workload Migration, and/or Application Verification jobs that must be scheduled, the process is generally far from linear. Discreet steps require handoffs, notifications of completion, or exceptions, as well as some feedback into an aggregate set of management reports or dashboards. With both business and technical requirements and a diversity of environments and parties, Job Scheduling is a reflection of both time and resources and understanding capacities and capabilities of all types. Mastering the inputs and outputs of these tasks along with their measurements makes certain that the migration trains continue to run on time.