Office 365 and cloud services programme for public body

Support and accelerate the programme

Our customer, a regional governance body serving a major UK city, was part-way through a substantial programme of work to deploy and adopt Office 365. The programme was well-established, with several key projects and milestones delivered and further work in progress and timetabled.

Planned work included technical activities to migrate email and file share data to the Microsoft cloud, and change management activities to engage stakeholders and support adoption of new Office 365 capabilities. Work was being managed by an in-house team of project managers, software engineers and business partners supported by Microsoft FastTrack and Premier Support resources.

As the programme transitioned from a primarily technical focus to a focus on engagement and adoption, our customer’s project team had identified a requirement for external resources to assist with planning and implementing activities to deploy and support adoption of Office 365 and Microsoft Cloud Services.

Specifically, our customer required help in three areas:

1. Planning and delivery of small-scale pilots to test new Office 365 capabilities and feed into wider rollout plan
2. Specialist resource to support activities relating to cloud migration and deployment of cloud services
3. User engagement and adoption support, including demos, education and end-user training

Technical and enablement projects to deliver programme objectives

Working with our partner – a leading global solutions and systems integrator – and our customer’s project team, our first step was to clarify the programme objectives, which were defined as follows:

• Promote flexible working: greater variety of devices, working from diverse locations
• Promote greater collaboration
• Reduce inhouse infrastructure and associated management overheads

We next established a simple programme planning process:

1. Identify and agree high-level areas / categories for the programme
2. Agree priorities (programme deliverables / milestones) within these categories
3. Define and prioritise projects based on priority items within each category to develop project roadmap
4. Plan and deliver the prioritised projects

Using this model we defined, prioritised and delivered a series of projects aligned with and supporting the agreed programme objectives, providing and coordinating specialist resources as required to supplement the Betterworking team.

Key projects delivered included:

Email migration to the cloud

Project to complete the Exchange Online migration and transition Exchange services from on-premises infrastructure to the Microsoft cloud. Included the following activities:

• Completion of Exchange Online mailbox migration for all users
• Public folder transition to Office 365
• Enterprise Vault archive data transition to Exchange Online
• Mail routing switch-over to Microsoft cloud environment
• Decommissioning of on-premises elements following transition to cloud services

Enterprise content management

Project to design and pilot a strategy and architecture for migrating file content from on-premise SAN storage to Office 365. Work included:

• Assessment of existing on-premise file storage
• Develop content migration strategy, with personal data transitioning to OneDrive for Business and shared / departmental data migrating to SharePoint Online
• Design and configure SharePoint Online site using initial pilot set of data from customer’s Technology Group function
• Set up and run demos to showcase capabilities and alternative approaches using SharePoint sites, Microsoft Teams and comparing metadata and folder based models for document libraries

IT Service Desk training

This project focused on upskilling the customer’s in-house IT team to help them manage, troubleshoot and provide end-user support for core Office 365 services.

• In person training for IT Service desk staff, including hands-on tasks completed in a lab environment
• Modules included: Office 365 Identity, Security & Mobility; Managing Office 365 users and Groups; Supporting Office 365 ProPlus; Managing Exchange Online; Managing and Supporting Skype for Business; Managing SharePoint Online; Managing Office 365 collaboration solutions (including Teams and Yammer); and Monitoring and troubleshooting Office 365

Office 365 apps training

Project to engage and educate end-users on the new Office 365 apps available to them, focusing on capabilities to support personal productivity and team working.

• Covering Office Online, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Skype for Business and Yammer
• Presenting Office 365 apps as a toolkit to support enhanced communication, collaboration and flexible working across the organisation
• Highlighting differences and interrelationships between the apps and encouraging delegates to experiment with using new capabilities in their day-to-day work

Drop-in clinics

This project was run as a follow-up to the Office 365 apps training, focusing on the use of Office 365 apps within the context of specific functional teams.

• Providing suggestions and guidance on how functional teams can leverage Office 365 capabilities to improve productivity, processes and team working
• Interactive sessions, answering questions and brain storming potential use cases for Office 365
• Helping users understand and embrace the business process capabilities of Office 365

Upgraded technical environment and enabled workforce

The overall objectives of supporting the customer’s internal teams and accelerating the programme were achieved, with each of the specific projects successfully delivered.

• The email migration project provided a better quality service for users while also reducing costs and resources needed for managing the on-premises Exchange infrastructure
• The enterprise content management project provided insights and direction on strategy, architecture and configuration to equip the in-house team to move forward with migration of on-premises file data to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business
• The IT Service Desk training elevated the in-house capabilities for administering, managing and support each of the Office 365 services as it came onstream
• The Office 365 apps training and drop-in clinics engaged and enabled employees to leverage both the personal productivity and collaborative capabilities of Office 365 in the context of their daily work

Our engagement was completed in late 2019, providing our customer with an upgraded technical environment and enabled workforce who were well equipped to manage the transition to fully remote working as the UK went into lockdown in early 2020.