From a manager's perspective I see a couple of questions that have to be answered when looking at migrating Swing applications to Web applications. First, does my customer need this? Currently, a number of different commands are run on an AIX or Windows command line to run the Swing applications. The internal customers feel it's easier to go to a browser instead of understanding command-line syntax to run the applications.

Do I have the skillsets on my team to transfer the Swing application to a Web-based tool?

My team is very skilled in Java and has experience in creating Web applications. I worry that there'll be problems transferring all the logic from the Swing-based applications to the Web-based applications correctly because of the current design problems that exist. However, this would be a perfect time to analyze the problems and correct them.

Are there enough people on my team to do this? This is the extremely hard part of being a manager. Estimating how long a project can take is not a fine art. If the estimation isn't done properly, time is wasted or not enough employees are allocated. The migration requirements must be gathered and sized. Once sized, a manager must support his development leads with the resources that they need.

These are just a couple of the things that I've chewed on my first month of experience. Perhaps, other first-time managers have had the same things happen in their department. Making management decisions is not an exact art but hopefully the situations I've described give you an idea of one approach.

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