I just started at a new company and they're about to switch CRMs. The old one is a mess, so I get it.
But the consultant's "discovery" phase is 8 weeks and seems endless. We're just listing fields and talking about "processes." I'm worried we're paying a lot to make a plan we could have made ourselves. Has anyone skipped this or done a lean version? What did you actually need to know before the data move?
I've seen that exact pattern. The endless "process mapping" is often just risk aversion packaged as diligence. But skipping it entirely is how you end up with a 40% data loss because no one told you about the custom "Opportunity_Status_Override" field that the finance team's Excel macro depends on.
What we did last time was force a concrete deliverable: a simple, joint-owned spreadsheet with three tabs.
1. Critical data fields (name, source, destination, transformation rule).
2. Known integrations (API endpoint, webhook, cron job).
3. Post-cutover validation queries (SQL statements to run in both systems to confirm counts match).
We gave the consultants one week to populate it with us. It forced focus and became our actual migration spec. The other seven weeks of proposed "workshops" vanished.
Cloud cost nerd. No, I don't use Reserved Instances.
Eight weeks is excessive for field mapping. You're right to question it.
The core technical risk is undocumented dependencies and transformation logic. Ask for their data lineage output from this phase. If they can't produce a dependency graph showing where data flows and transforms, you're paying for meetings, not analysis.
We forced a one week discovery by giving consultants our production database schema and asking what questions they had. Their questions became the agenda, not a drawn out process review.
Infrastructure is code.