Wave Planning

Wave Planning groups your treated applications into sequenced migration waves. It integrates application sizing and the Cloud Accelerate Factory so each wave reflects real effort, dependencies and delivery resourcing. Complete 6R treatments first so the planner has accurate inputs.

The left sub-nav has three areas: Wave Plan, App Complexity and Wave Settings.

Wave Plan¶

The Wave Plan is the working view of the schedule. Set the overall window with Edit Start Date, and read the headline metrics from the tiles (counts illustrative):

Two toggles control how the plan behaves: Auto Planning Enabled lets Dr Migrate group and sequence waves automatically, and Recalculate Wave Plan re-runs the planner against the latest data and settings.

The plan itself is a Gantt-style view of waves and their applications. Use Collapse All / Expand All to control detail, and Add Wave to create a new wave. Narrow the view with the filters: Wave, Select App, Complexity, Treatment and CAF Assigned. You can export the plan to XLS.

Move applications between waves by dragging them; any application you remove drops into Unassigned until you place it. Where a wave is CAF-assigned, the plan can surface the savings Microsoft covers, because the Cloud Accelerate Factory provides the resourcing for those workloads.

App Complexity¶

Application Sizing & Complexity Analysis classifies each application into a sizing band, which feeds the effort and duration of every wave. The AI evaluates workload scale, integrations, environments and migration-coordination signals to place each app in one of five bands:

The screen also shows the inputs and outputs behind the bands:

• Sizing Rules: the thresholds that define each band.
• Duration Estimation: how a band translates into estimated migration effort and duration.
• Largest Server Footprint: the applications with the heaviest infrastructure.
• Most App-to-App Dependencies: the most interconnected applications.
• Applications by Sizing Band: the spread of the estate across the five bands.

Wave Settings¶

Wave Sizing controls how the planner builds waves. Set the three core limits to match your delivery capacity:

These settings determine whether waves run sequentially (one after another with a single team) or in parallel, where multiple teams work concurrent waves to shorten the overall timeline. More parallel teams compress the schedule but raise the resourcing required at any moment.

Planning Preferences¶

Two toggles shape how the plan is sequenced:

• Prioritise Landing Zone Foundation: sequence the foundational work first, setting up identity, networking, security, monitoring and platform services before application waves begin.
• Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Factory: optimise wave planning for CAF delivery, so CAF-aligned applications are grouped and sequenced to suit the factory.

Duration Planning Model¶

The Duration Planning Model sets the duration factors applied per complexity band, so wave durations reflect how much effort each band of application actually takes.

When you've adjusted settings, use Save settings to store them, or Save & Recalculate to apply them and rebuild the wave plan in one step.

Wave Grouping¶

Wave Grouping controls which attributes the planner weighs when deciding how to group and sequence applications into waves. Each attribute has an adjustable weight slider; higher weight means the planner favours keeping applications with the same value together. A running Total Weight indicator shows the sum across all attributes, and a Reset to Default action restores the original weighting. Attributes available:

• App Criticality
• App Function
• App Owner
• Business Unit
• Complexity Rating
• CPU Usage
• Data Center
• PII Data
• Inherent Risk
• Materiality
• Memory Usage
• Migration Strategy
• Affinity Group (Recommended)

Advanced Settings¶

Two additional controls fine-tune the planner's behaviour:

• Shared Services Sensitivity: a numeric input (0–100). Higher values make the planner more sensitive to shared services, keeping tightly coupled dependencies together. Default is 70.
• Limit Strategy: a dropdown that determines how the planner handles waves that exceed the configured size limits. For example, Soft Limits allows network affinity groups larger than the limit to remain intact rather than being broken across waves.

Cloud Accelerate Factory (CAF)¶

The Cloud Accelerate Factory (previously the Microsoft Migration Factory, now integrated directly into wave planning) is a Microsoft programme that covers the resourcing for qualifying migrations. Dr Migrate auto-identifies candidate applications that meet Microsoft's criteria and folds them into the plan.

Candidate applications move through a series of states:

• Auto-identified: Dr Migrate flags applications that meet the CAF criteria.
• Nominated: you or the customer put applications forward for consideration.
• CAF-aligned: confirmed for factory delivery.

CAF-aligned applications flow straight into wave planning, and their waves can show the savings Microsoft covers because the factory provides the migration resourcing. Filter the Wave Plan by CAF Assigned to see them in context.