Migration Archetypes

Migrations classified by what changes on each side of the contact. An ownership or location change can accompany any of the three or occur alone.

Migration archetypes are a classification of service migrations by what changes for the customer and what changes for the agent, rather than by the system being moved from or to. The classification is used to decide, before a plan is built, which planning assumptions must be stated and which may be carried over from the departing operation. A migration that changes only who owns the work rests on a different assumption set from one that replaces the channel a customer uses to make contact, and a planning method treating the two identically will understate one of them.

The classification is a planning control rather than a project-management taxonomy. It sits alongside the transition scope, phasing and cutover plan without replacing them, and answers a narrower question: what may be assumed to transfer.

Why the classification is by what changes

The conventional description of a migration names its endpoints — one platform to another, one supplier to another, one site to another. That description is sufficient for sequencing work and insufficient for planning capacity, because two migrations with identical endpoints can place different demands on a workforce plan.

A capacity plan is a chain of transfers. Contact rates, handle times, channel splits, seasonal shape and shrinkage are each carried forward from the departing operation on the implicit assumption that what they measure has not changed. Where that assumption holds, the transfer is sound and the residual risk sits in supply timing. Where it fails, the plan inherits a number describing an operation that no longer exists.

The archetype makes the implicit assumption explicit by asking two questions of every migration:

• What does the customer meet? Entry points, channels, the synchronicity of the conversation, the self-service surface.
• What does the agent meet? The desktop, the transaction tool, the knowledge source, the process for completing a unit of work.

Answering both produces four archetypes, three of which occupy a grid while the fourth cuts across it.

The four archetypes

Archetype	What changes	Does demand change?	Does cost per contact change?	Dominant planning risk
A — Lift and shift	Neither side. The same work reaches the same people through the same surfaces	No	No	Supply timing and attrition through the transition
B — Platform change	The agent's tools and process; the customer sees no difference	No	Yes — handle time rises during and after cutover	Understated handle time; a relearning curve that applies to experienced staff
C — Experience change	The customer's channel or entry point, and usually the agent's tools with it	Yes, and unpredictably	Yes	No usable history; the departing channel's measures do not describe the arriving one
D — Ownership or location change	Who performs the work, or where. Neither the customer's route nor the agent's tools necessarily change	No	Indirectly, through tenure mix and knowledge loss	Eligibility, notice periods, employment-transfer law, knowledge that leaves with departing staff

Archetypes A, B and C are mutually exclusive positions on the grid. D is orthogonal: an ownership or location change may accompany any of the three or occur alone. A book moved to a new supplier on the same platform is D alone; a book moved to a joint venture that also operates a different transaction tool is D and B together.

A — Lift and shift

The departing operation's measured behavior transfers in full. The planning model is the existing model with a ramp and an attrition assumption applied across the transition window. This is the only archetype in which carrying the departure baseline forward without adjustment is defensible, and even here what transfers is measured behavior rather than the plan that produced it.

B — Platform change

Demand is unchanged; the unit cost of serving it is not. Completing a task in a different tool is a different task from the performer's point of view, and the performance loss associated with moving knowledge into a changed context applies to experienced staff as well as to new ones.

This distinguishes the archetype from a ramp. A ramp resolves with tenure; a process penalty carried by experienced staff does not, and a model expecting it to will continue forecasting a recovery that does not arrive.

The archetype therefore requires two assumptions a ramp model does not carry: the size of the handle-time penalty at cutover, and its decay profile. Neither is available from the departing operation's history, because the departing operation never used the tool.

The definitional consequences of a platform change — that shared object definitions become critical path rather than hygiene — are treated at Platform Migration as a Definitional Forcing Function.

C — Experience change

The customer's route into the service changes. This covers a new channel, a change in the synchronicity of an existing one, and the addition of an entry point that did not previously exist.

The archetype is distinguished by the absence of usable history. Where the channel is new there is no series to forecast from, and the forecasting problem becomes a judgmental one supported by analogy rather than an extrapolative one. Where the channel is a converted one, the departing channel's series describes different customer behavior and cannot be rebaselined by adjustment; that case is treated at Asynchronous-to-Synchronous Channel Conversion.

A subtler instance is the new entry point: the customer's route changes while the agent's desktop does not. An integration placing the service inside a messaging platform the customer already uses removes a step from the path to contact without altering anything the agent sees. Agent-side measures therefore remain stable, and the volume effect arrives in the demand line without prior indication.

D — Ownership or location change

Demand is unchanged and the customer is usually unaware of it. The plan is a supply-side plan, and its assumptions concern eligibility of the receiving population, notice periods, the sequencing constraints imposed by employment law in the relevant jurisdiction, and the knowledge that leaves with departing staff.

Demand being unchanged does not make the demand assumptions optional. The requirement is still computed from a contact rate and a handle time, and the tenure mix of the receiving population moves the second of these — so both remain mandatory rows, with the knowledge-loss assumption carrying the size of the effect.

The sequencing constraints may be binding rather than advisory. In jurisdictions implementing automatic transfer-of-undertaking provisions, whether a given migration constitutes a relevant transfer — and what sequencing consequences follow — is determined by national implementing law and its case law rather than by the framework directive alone. Where such provisions may apply, the capacity plan is downstream of a legal calendar it does not control, and the planning consequence is that the earliest feasible date is an input rather than an output.

What the archetype determines

The purpose of classifying is to set the mandatory rows of the migration's assumption register. A register requiring every field of every migration is not read; one requiring the fields the archetype makes load-bearing is.

Assumption	A	B	C	D
Contact rate and its denominator	●	●	●	●
Market or country split	●	●	●	●
Channel split, current and expected	●	●	●
Seasonality and weekly profile	●	●	●	●
Handle-time definition	●	●	●	●
Handle-time penalty at cutover, and decay		●	●
Experience change: synchronicity, timeout, entry points			●
Training length, nesting, proficiency curve	●	●	●	●
Shrinkage	●	●	●	●
Eligibility, notice periods, transfer law				●
Knowledge loss on exit				●

The register itself, including the convention of attaching a sensitivity to each row, is described at The Assumption Register.

The baseline rule

The walk from departure to arrival. The rule bites at the first step: the baseline is the departing operation's own measured behavior, not a norm borrowed from the arriving one.

Every archetype shares one rule, and it is the rule most often broken. The point of departure is the departing operation's own measured behavior for the markets being migrated, computed on pre-migration periods only — not a platform norm, and not a whole-account average.

Two failure modes sit behind it. Substituting a platform norm — the rate typically observed on the arriving system across its other clients — imports the behavior of a different population. Substituting a whole-account average where only part of an account is moving imports the behavior of the markets that are staying, which is the aggregation error in which a statistic computed over a whole fails to describe any of the subgroups composing it.

The restriction to pre-migration periods addresses a third effect. Once phasing begins, the departing operation's measures are affected by the migration itself: residual work, changed mix and the earlier departure of simpler volume all move the baseline, generally in the direction that flatters the plan. A baseline recomputed after phasing has begun will understate the gap.

The construction of the walk from departure to arrival is set out at Migrating a Book of Business, which also treats the like-for-like ratio rule and the conversion from ratio to workload.

Failure modes

• Classifying by endpoint. A migration described as a move to a new platform carries no information about whether the customer's route changed. Both questions have to be asked explicitly.
• Treating C as A. A new channel planned on the departing channel's contact rate produces a plan wrong by a multiple rather than by a margin, and the error is not observable until volume arrives.
• Missing D beneath another archetype. Where an ownership change accompanies a platform change, the legal calendar constrains the technical sequence. Discovering the constraint after the technical plan is fixed forces a replan.
• Declaring the archetype after the plan is built. The classification functions as a control only if it precedes the model. Applied afterwards it explains a failure rather than preventing one.

Maturity Model Position

At Level 1–2, migrations are planned by whoever owns the receiving operation, using whatever data is available, and the archetype is implicit. At Level 3, the classification is declared at the start of planning and drives a standard assumption set. At Level 4, the handle-time penalty and its decay are estimated from the organization's own record of prior migrations rather than assumed, and the assumption set carries sensitivities. At Level 5, archetype classification is an input to the commercial decision about migration sequencing, so that concurrent high-uncertainty transitions are not committed against a single planning capability.

See Also

• Migrating a Book of Business
• Asynchronous-to-Synchronous Channel Conversion
• Platform Migration as a Definitional Forcing Function
• The Assumption Register
• The Migration Health Pack
• Simpson's Paradox in Contact Center Metrics
• Agent Onboarding and Nesting Period Management
• Speed to proficiency curve
• Capacity Planning Cycle
• Service Level During Work Migration
• Migration Modeling Readiness