Tools, templates and assessments for the Plan phase of CAF (Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework)

 Microsoft is offering an excellent framework to support cloud migration and adoption process – Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) 

The framework defined an iterative process with the following phases:

1. Define Strategy
2. Plan
3. Ready
4. Adopt
5. Govern
6. Manage

For each of them, Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) provides us a list of templates, tools, and assessment mechanisms that can help us to improve the adoption and migration process. Let's take a look at the ones for Plan.

Azure DevOps Demo Generator

Location: https://azuredevopsdemogenerator.azurewebsites.net/?name=CloudAdoptionPlan | https://docs.microsoft.com/ro-ro/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/plan/template

During the Plan phase, we can end up in discussions related to how we want the CI/CD system looks like, how we can do a match between the way how we want to deploy the solution and control the environments and the features provided by different solution like Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps Demo Generator is a tool that enables us to create predefined environments and pipelines connected to mock repositories.

The templates are covering multiple scenarios, including cases where you want to run tests, have different conditions or use the CAF checklist during the build and deployment.

It can be used with success at the moment in time when we need to validate different business scenarios, and we don’t want to lose a few hours to build and set up the initial configuration. In 10 minutes, we can have Azure DevOps sandbox ready for us, where we can start to check different features that we are looking for.

Cloud Adoption Plan

Location: https://archcenter.blob.core.windows.net/cdn/fusion/readiness/Microsoft-Cloud-Adoption-Framework-Strategy-and-Plan-Template.docx | https://docs.microsoft.com/ro-ro/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/reference/tools-templates

This word document template enables us to define the initial plan, providing us support to catch what the motivations drivers, the expected business outcome, and the what are the adoption plan.

During the planning phase, we can use the template to ensure that we cover:

1. Digital estate: When we evaluate the current technologies and solutions that we are using and how we can prepare them for cloud adoption.
2. Organizational alignment: The main purpose of defining how the government will be made is how it is implemented together with the person responsible for each item.
3. Skills readiness plan: Defining a list of skills and cloud capabilities needed to ensure cloud adoption success. This section's output is a list of courses and training that needs to be run, together with the target audience and priority.

It is important to remember that the format of this document is not fixed. We can integrate the sections inside the document templates that could already exist inside our organization. What we need to ensure that we cover and document this piece of information during the Plan phase.