On migrating platforms, software, workflows

December 17, 2020

What friction points there are in moving from ArcMap to Pro?

Familiarity – people are busy. Only half a dozen staff in Env use GIS as the primary job function. These will migrate themselves. The other two dozen or so use it in support of their primary duty. It’s indispensable, but secondary. Asking them to take days to learn new thing to do the same old thing that doesn’t materially advance or improve their primary deliverables is a non-starter. If we can’t demonstrate how New Hotness is going to make their “real job” easier/faster/smarter we just have to wait for them to retire or move to another position.

Not everything is there – ArcMap for all it’s agedness and limitations will always have some little feature or button or workflow that’s not present in Pro, because Those Who Decide in Redlands don’t see it as important. I’ve been using Pro near full time for over a year. I like it, mostly, and I still fire up ArcMap almost everyday for one reason or another. It doesn’t take much time on the ArcGIS Ideas website to see this is common.

The message from both of these points is that need to have ArcMap available is not going away in less than 10 years. The size and occurrence of the need will drop away with time though.

In my opinion the best way to figure out how to migrate is to watch people do their jobs, go away to the skunkworks lab and replicate their workflow, making all manner of improvements along the way, and then come back with a recipe and demo. Now they want the new thing and are not entering the process with an air of resignation and resistance and executing procrastination after procrastination.

Asking people what’s in the way sounds like a reasonable information gathering exercise, but it’s always going to return with so many omissions and misstatements that it’s not actually all that useful for planning and making decisions on. You’re absolutely going to get sideswiped by the things they didn’t think to mention or lacked the words to describe adequately so their true import is lost.

(BTW, it’s entirely possible in that in the skunkworks dev phase you actually can’t improve the process, or even make it more difficult. In that case it’s important to say so and let the user keep the preferred method. You want their confidence in you to make the right call on their behalf more than anything else.)

Excerpt from an email conversation with some co-workers. This portion here because the central idea is important and germane to so many different situations. I want to keep reminding myself that this is how I want to conduct and manage changes.