The Five People in Every Lettings Migration Team

Walk into any lettings agency going through a CRM migration and you'll find the same five people. Different names, same chaos, same essential role in keeping the whole thing together. We know this because we've worked with all of them. Many times.

The Spreadsheet Warrior Already built a tracking document before anyone asked. It has seventeen tabs. The pivot table in tab six is genuinely impressive. The master spreadsheet is always "almost ready." It has never once been ready. It will not be ready by go live. It will, however, be incredibly detailed.

The Reconciliation Gremlin Found the £0.02 discrepancy. Not because anyone asked. Because it was there and it was wrong. They will not move on until it's resolved. They have dreamed about it. They are, in the context of client accounts, completely invaluable. In the context of a migration timeline, occasionally the reason it shifts.

The Jira Ninja Moves silently. You'll look at the project board one morning and everything will have moved to "In Progress." Nobody saw this happen. A task marked complete by the Jira Ninja may mean it is complete. It may mean it is complete enough. It may mean it has been moved somewhere where it is no longer visible and therefore no longer a problem.

The Rent Arrears Detective Knows everything. Who owes what. Since when. What was agreed, communicated, promised, and definitely not promised but now being claimed was promised. They have the receipts. All of them. They take every late payment personally. Actually personally.

The One Who Knows Where All the Hidden Reports Are Will produce a report from 2019 that answers the question nobody else could answer. Nobody knew this report existed. Only they know where it lives. They are aware of their own indispensability. They wear it lightly. You will notice it when they smile.

Here's the truth about migrations: the technology is rarely the hardest part. The hardest part is the humans, their habits, their workarounds, their institutional knowledge, and their emotional investment in the way things have always been done.

These five people aren't obstacles.

They're the reason migrations succeed.

Our job at Russou is to work alongside them, capture the knowledge they hold, and make sure none of it gets lost when the new system goes live.

Because the data is never really the complicated part. It's always the humans.

Loveable, chaotic, completely essential humans.

Book a 20-minute chaos audit at http://russou.co.uk