The words this guide uses, as it uses them. For construction terms in general, see the glossary in construction-data.
| Term | Meaning here |
|---|---|
| Archive | Records exported from the old system to a read-only store with an index, and not loaded into the new one (chapter 8) |
| Balance | One summarised figure per job, cost code and cost type, dated at cutover, in place of line-by-line history. In the neutral model its source is opening_balance |
| Ball in court | The party who owes the next action on an open item |
| Control total | A figure printed by the old system's own report at cutover, used as the answer the migrated data must reproduce (chapter 7) |
| Crosswalk | A table mapping each old code to its new code, with the reason for every merge (chapter 5) |
| Cutover | The point at which the old system stops being the book of record and the new one starts. Always a closed period end |
| Data owner | The person inside the company who owns the migration: inventory, mappings, trial loads, issue log (chapter 2) |
| Detail | Every open record migrated line by line with its own identifier, so it can be acted on after cutover |
| Export route | How data gets out of a system: API, documented format, report export, database extract, or copy and paste (export routes) |
| Go / no-go | The decision, on the last day before the new system opens, whether to open it (template) |
| Hypercare | The first two weeks after go-live, with daily check-ins and a review of every new commitment and change (chapter 12) |
| Manifest | A list of every file in an export or archive with its size and SHA-256 hash, used to prove a copy is complete and unaltered |
| Mapping | A file that says how each field of an old system's export becomes a field of the neutral model (mappings) |
| Neutral model | The nine record types this guide maps everything into and out of (chapter 3) |
| Open obligation | Anything the company still has to do after cutover: pay, bill, release retainage, answer, argue a change. The thing a migration exists to move |
| Parallel run | One period after cutover in which the essentials are entered in both systems and compared job by job (chapter 2) |
| Profile | An automated inspection of a raw export before mapping, for problems such as ambiguous dates and spreadsheet damage (chapter 4) |
| Reconciliation | Recomputing each control total from the migrated data and comparing it to the old system's figure, to the cent (chapter 7) |
| Roll-forward | Checking at a later period end that opening balance plus the period's activity equals the closing balance (chapter 12) |
| Scope decision | For each record type, the choice of detail, balance, archive or leave, agreed in writing (chapter 2) |
| Sign-off | The reconciliation document signed by the controller, the PM lead and the data owner, with the control reports attached |
| Staging area | The single, access-controlled place where exports are kept during the migration, and deleted from afterwards (chapter 13) |
| Trial load | A full rehearsal of the load into a test copy of the new system, reconciled like the real one. Plan for at least two |
Part of Construction data migration · Maintained by Constructelligence · Planning a migration? Ask us on GitHub.