The best time to begin the conversion process is when the components to be controlled are concentrated in a small number of groups—for example, immediately following a software release. The following actions help you prepare a hierarchy for the conversion process.

• Create the project definition to be used with the converted hierarchy. See Defining the project environment, for details.
• Verify that all partitioned data sets to be controlled are available online. If the data is not in partitioned data sets, allocate partitioned data sets by following Step 5: Allocate the project partitioned data sets, and copy data from the existing data sets to the partitioned data sets.
• Delete all unnecessary data from the libraries being converted.
• If you intend to use non-key groups in the converted hierarchy, ensure that they do not contain any data before conversion.