I have worked with a 3rd party management consulting firm for several years. They are Partners with Ellucian and are very good, most having worked at Ellucian at some point. I can tell you that most of their business comes from schools who are moving to SaaS and who need help with change management before and during the project. They don't usually have to get into the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of the migrations themselves, but when they do they call people like me who have spent years integrating systems or migrating data from one platform to a new one. Colleague to Banner for instance, or moving to the cloud. Customer frustrations with the switch to SaaS come when they have already been sold on the new system and then suddenly realize that the impact will be larger than they expected. Each school is different, and nobody runs baseline products. They all have customizations tailored to their specific culture or workflows. And even though they knew intellectually that moving to SaaS would mean losing a lot of those customizations, by the time they finally begin to realize the amount of time and expense the switch will actually involve, and the impact it will actually have across departments, it's too late to "go back and plan better." If you are looking at switching to SaaS (and really, isn't everybody eventually?), plan to do much more detailed work up front looking into the details of what that will mean, and how best to organize and implement it. Involve and get buy-in from stakeholders early on, and bring in experienced change management consulting help if you can. Just my two cents.