Where you're moving from
We run migrations to Halo from ServiceNow, Freshservice, TOPdesk, and legacy or homegrown service desks. Every source is different in the details; the method below is the same. If you're still at the should we leave stage rather than the how stage, start with moving off ServiceNow — the routing guide, including when Halo isn't your answer.
How a migration runs
1. Fixed-price assessment. We inventory what you have — processes, data, integrations, the way your teams actually work — and produce a mapping specification, a migration plan, and the pricing for everything that follows.
2. Configure the destination — to the depth that fits. The home exists before the data arrives, but how finished it needs to be on day one is a choice: some organisations build the full target state before cutover; others — especially when a renewal date is forcing the pace — land on a solid basic configuration and improve from there in live service. Which is right depends on your maturity, your urgency, and where you're ultimately heading; the assessment settles it. Either way, we design the service catalogue around who the desk will serve, set up teams and routing so tickets land with the right people, and build the workflows, SLAs and CMDB structure the chosen depth needs. This is consultancy — judgement work, priced as such (see below).
3. Move the data — as much of it as you actually need. How much history to bring is a scope decision, not a default: some organisations start fresh and wind the old system down, some bring only the tickets currently in flight, others need years of history for audit or continuity. Whatever scope you choose, the mechanics are the same — your records move faithfully into their new home, unchanged, via our tooling partner Help Desk Migration, fixed-price for the chosen scope, with an arithmetic acceptance test: what was in scope is now here. And if what you need goes beyond what the tooling covers, we augment it — building that extra reach is exactly the kind of engineering we do.
4. Cutover and adopt. Before go-live, UAT: your people test the configured system against their real work, and we train agents and administrators so day one isn't a surprise. Then cutover — a short freeze window, the final delta — and hypercare: we stay through the settling-in period, fixing and changing whatever needs it, because the first fortnight is where configuration meets reality.
What the tooling does — and what it doesn't
The data move can be fixed-price because service desk platforms share a stable domain model: an incident maps to an incident, a comment to a comment. The mapping is knowable in advance, which is exactly what our tooling partner has industrialised — their published capabilities define what the fixed price covers, and the assessment confirms your estate fits inside them. Anything beyond that coverage gets scoped honestly — and where the need justifies it, we augment the tooling ourselves; building migration tooling is what our test-tools practice does for a living.
What the tooling deliberately does not do is redesign anything on the way through. The move is a move: your data lands as it was. Restructuring categories, cleaning up years of drift, rethinking the catalogue — that's design work, it belongs in the configuration stage, and folding it into "the migration" is how migrations turn into disputes. We keep the boundary visible so yours doesn't.
How the pricing works
Three components, three shapes, one principle: we fix the price where the work is standard, and sell time where the work is judgement.
The assessment is fixed-price — it's a bounded deliverable. The data move is fixed-price — the tooling makes it standard work with an arithmetic acceptance test. The consultancy — configuration, process design, adoption — runs as fixed-hour packages you can extend as you need, or as a bespoke project priced from the assessment for larger programmes.
CHC Helicopter: the reference point
CHC Helicopter, a global aviation business, moved from ServiceNow to HaloITSM with BDQ at scale — with an estimated licensing saving of around 70%. Read the case study →
The honest word on timelines
The data move is quick — that's what tooling buys. The calendar goes on configuration and adoption, and how much depends on your process scope, team structure and integration count — and, just as much, on your team's availability and how many people need to agree at each step. That's why we schedule time up front, on both sides' calendars, so we both know what we're doing and when. You'll have a real timeline, built from your estate and your availability, before you commit to anything beyond the assessment itself.
Book a fixed-price migration assessment — mapping specification, migration plan, and real pricing for the whole journey.
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