Data center work comes in phases, and each phase needs a different crew. Staffing a migration with an operations team, or running operations with a build team, is where schedules slip and outages happen.
Build and fit-out
- Critical facilities engineers for power distribution, UPS, generators and cooling
- Structured cabling and rack-and-stack technicians
- Construction and commissioning managers coordinating trades and integrated systems testing
Migration and consolidation
- Migration project managers who plan move groups, cutover windows and rollback
- Network engineers and architects for the new topology and interconnects
- Storage, backup and virtualization engineers to move workloads without data loss
- Application owners' liaisons to schedule and validate each move
Operations
- Data center operations technicians for monitoring, remote hands and incident response
- DCIM and capacity planning analysts
- Security and compliance staff for physical access and audits such as SOC 2
How to staff the phases
Build and migration are time-bound and suit contract or project teams. Operations is steady-state and usually permanent, often seeded by contract-to-hire from the migration team so knowledge of the environment stays in the building.