A Story You’ll Follow
From here on, the course follows one organisation through a real-shaped migration - strategy, analysis, design, build, and what they learned. Meet Deep Hole Gravel Services Plc (DHGS).
DHGS is a regional gravel and infill-products company: around 200 large accounts, 1,000+ SME customers, its own delivery fleet, an online retail arm, and gravel-extraction equipment out in the field. Twenty years of growth has left it with ten legacy systems that don’t talk to each other - each “owned” by a different part of the business, none of them trusting the others’ data.
Now DHGS is moving to Activity-Based Costing (ABC), and that finally forces all of that data together onto one platform. That is the migration you’ll work through.
Why DHGS Is the Perfect Teacher
DHGS is the Responsibility Gap in miniature. The business knows what the data means; IT is handed the job of moving it. Ten systems, ten sets of assumptions, one deadline. It is exactly the situation PDM was built for - and exactly the situation where doing the migration as a single virtual team, rather than two sides across a wall, is the difference between success and failure.
You don’t need to memorise anything yet. Just meet the cast - because you’ll see them again.
The Cast (Plant the Clues)
A few names and artefacts will keep coming back. Watch for them:
- Whit Bissell - DHGS’s production manager, who runs the Kelsey Pit extraction equipment off a spreadsheet nobody officially declared, and who resents IT “touching his systems.” He starts as a blocker. Later you’ll see how the right engagement turns him into a signed-off stakeholder - and how the data-quality problems hiding in his spreadsheet become items you track to resolution.
- Logia vs HAL - the two systems integrators who bid for the DHGS migration. In the next module you’ll weigh their proposals yourself.
- The Kelsey Pit equipment data - looks simple, turns out not to be. When mapping starts, this is where things first go wrong - and you’ll already have been warned why.
📦 The DHGS Story. From the next module on, a box like this appears once per module and picks up where the last one left off - like episodes. By the case-study finale the whole migration comes together, and it’s yours to work through end to end.
Key Takeaways
- DHGS is a regional gravel company migrating ten disconnected legacy systems onto a single ABC platform - a realistic, business-driven migration
- It is the Responsibility Gap at full scale, and the reason a single virtual team matters
- Watch for Whit Bissell and the Kelsey Pit spreadsheet, and the Logia vs HAL bids - they return as the course unfolds
Book Reference
Practical Data Migration by Johny Morris (BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT): Chapter 3, “PDMv3 Overview”.