During the project, he learned the value of "staying in touch with the user community to find out if there's an impact of changes," he recalled. There were minor outages in the initial phases of the turnover, but "we learned that every migration has a risk, and you can limit the risk," he explained.

It's important that end users know that "something will fail" when a network is altered, he said. "And IT managers have to make sure users know how to deal with it and how to raise a call to somebody in the project organization."

During such a migration, network administrators need to tell end users, "Hey, man, it's a migration," Kuhn said. "If there's a problem, just knowing that makes things more pleasant" for the users.