"What's the status of the data migration?" If answering that question on your project requires pulling data from multiple spreadsheets, chasing down team leads, and spending half a day assembling a summary — you have a visibility problem. And that visibility problem is costing your project more than you think.
The Status Reporting Tax
On most migration projects I've worked on, gathering status was a project in itself. The PM would spend hours before each steering committee meeting pulling numbers from mapping spreadsheets, data quality trackers, test result files, and job execution logs. They'd consolidate everything into a PowerPoint deck, add some pie charts, and present it — knowing full well that the data was already stale by the time it reached the audience.
This isn't just an inconvenience. It's a tax on the project's most valuable resource: the migration team's time and attention. Every hour spent manually assembling status reports is an hour not spent actually managing the migration. And because the process is so labor-intensive, it typically happens once a week or once every two weeks — meaning decision-makers are always working from outdated information.
Worse, the manual nature of status gathering means important signals get lost. A trend in data quality results that would be obvious in a chart goes unnoticed when it's buried in a spreadsheet tab that no one reviews regularly. A business area that's falling behind on mapping doesn't get flagged until it's already on the critical path.
What dmPro Provides
dmPro includes approximately 100 built-in charts that cover every dimension of a data migration project. These aren't generic charts you have to configure from scratch — they're purpose-built visualizations designed specifically for data migration workflows, drawing directly from the structured data in your dmPro project.
Types of Charts Available
The chart library spans the full migration lifecycle:
- Progress charts: Mapping completion by business area, by legacy system, by target system. Cataloging progress. Profiling coverage. Testing completion rates. These give you a clear picture of where the project stands at every level.
- Data quality charts: Quality rule results by severity, by business area, by data element. Trend charts showing how data quality evolves over profiling iterations. Issue resolution rates. These surface data quality problems before they reach testing.
- Testing charts: Test execution status, pass/fail rates by migration job, defect trends, UAT sign-off progress. These show whether the migration is ready for production or whether there are systemic issues to address.
- Job execution charts: Migration job run history, execution times, record counts, error rates. These provide operational visibility into the actual migration runs.
- Scope and coverage charts: Table and column counts by classification, by business area, by migration phase. These help you understand the size and shape of the migration at a glance.
How Custom Dashboards Work
The real power comes from how users interact with these charts. Any user can create their own custom dashboards — personalized views built from the available chart library with pre-configured filters.
The process is straightforward:
- Pick your charts. Browse the chart library and select the visualizations that are most relevant to your role and responsibilities.
- Set your filters. Configure each chart with pre-set filters so it shows exactly the slice of the project you care about. Filter by business area, by legacy system, by classification, by status — whatever dimensions matter for your work.
- Arrange and save. Organize the charts on your dashboard in the layout that makes sense for you. Save it. Now every time you open your dashboard, it loads instantly with your specific view of the project.
You can create multiple dashboards for different purposes. A daily operational dashboard. A weekly leadership summary. A deep-dive view for a specific business area. Each one is tailored to a specific need and shows exactly the right information at the right level of detail.
Dashboards for Different Roles
Different stakeholders need different views of the migration. dmPro's custom dashboards make it easy for each role to get exactly what they need:
Executive Sponsor
A high-level dashboard showing project-wide health: overall migration progress, risk indicators, milestone status, and key metrics. Three or four charts that answer the question "are we on track?" in under 30 seconds. No need to sit through a status presentation — the information is always there, always current.
Project Manager
A more detailed view focused on progress by legacy system and business area, open issues and blockers, testing status, and upcoming milestones. The PM can see where attention is needed without spending hours assembling the information. Charts filtered to show areas that are behind schedule or have elevated risk indicators.
Data Migration Lead
A deep operational dashboard showing mapping and testing status for their assigned business area. Detailed views of data quality results, job execution history, and defect trends. This is the dashboard you check throughout the day to stay on top of your workstream.
ETL Development Lead
Charts focused on job specifications ready for development, jobs in progress, test results for completed jobs, and error patterns. A view that helps the development team prioritize work and identify systemic issues in their migration code.
Visibility Reduces Risk
This is the point that ties everything together: visibility is a risk reduction strategy. The biggest risks on a migration project are the ones nobody sees coming. When problems are invisible — buried in spreadsheets, hidden behind stale status reports, or simply not tracked at all — they grow until they become crises.
When you don't have visibility, problems hide until UAT — when they're 10x more expensive to fix. Real-time dashboards mean issues surface early, when they're still manageable.
Real-time dashboards change this dynamic fundamentally. When every stakeholder has access to current, accurate information about the migration's status, problems surface early. A business area falling behind on mapping gets flagged before it becomes critical path. A pattern of data quality issues in a particular legacy system gets noticed before it derails testing. A migration job with increasing error rates gets attention before it produces bad data in the target system.
No More Status Meetings Just to Gather Status
There's one more benefit worth highlighting. When everyone already has the information they need — on their own terms, in their own dashboards — status meetings transform. Instead of spending 45 minutes presenting status that people are seeing for the first time, you spend 45 minutes discussing issues, making decisions, and moving the project forward. Everyone arrives informed. The conversation starts at a higher level.
That shift alone — from status gathering to status discussion — makes a meaningful difference in how migration projects run. And it comes directly from giving every stakeholder real-time visibility into the data that matters to them.