Migration planning does not reward speed. It rewards sequencing.

Migration planning does not reward speed. It rewards sequencing. The projects that go sideways fastest are the ones where someone compressed the planning phase to hit a deadline. Discovery gets skipped or done shallow. The pilot runs once, nothing gets validated, and wave one becomes the real test environment. What actually matters: knowing what you have before you touch it. That means a proper AD assessment, not a quick glance at a spreadsheet someone built six months ago. It means running your pilot with real user populations, not just admin accounts that never exercise the permissions or group memberships causing problems in production. Coexistence needs to be tested, not assumed. Cutover sequencing needs to be walked through, not improvised. Rollback conditions need to be defined before the window opens, not after something breaks. The pressure to move fast is real. But a compressed timeline that skips testing does not save time. It borrows it from the post-migration remediation queue. Plan it once. Test it properly. The wave cadence can still be efficient without the planning being thin.