Content+Cloud is one of the UK’s leading technology services, solutions and support providers, with a passion for helping ambitious organisations and their people to succeed.
C+C have made acquisitions in recent years, namely ITLab, Content and Code, and Sol-tec. The new group brand wanted to bring together these employees on a new single tenant and architecture to have them effectively collaborate and communicate with each other. Speculo were engaged to provide the project management expertise to assist their internal IT teams, resources and business stakeholders in managing the project, and coordinating the actions necessary to migrate all users to the new Microsoft MS365 tenant.
Challenge
The individual business units all consumed the Microsoft 365 services in different ways, and had different models for storing data and sharing information. A mix of end-user device types meant the need for a common supportable image, and administration model would be needed to meet the demands of the ISO27001 and Cyber essentials accreditations. Microsoft partner accounts were all linked to existing tenants which needed to be consolidated under the new brand. Users are spread across two main territories (United Kingdom and South Africa).
- Migrate all email/Onedrive from existing tenant/s to the new C+C tenant
- Migrate all MS Teams and Sharepoint content to the new tenant
- Create a new IA (Information Architecture) governance model for the information stores and collaboration environment
- Create and define the policies and processes necessary to facilitate the group change
- Transition the new service into the existing IT Service desk and operational model
- Create the templates necessary to move future acquisitions into the MS365 tenant.
Solution
Speculo provided project management and project coordination services as an extension to the internal team capabilities. We provided the necessary project governance model and experience of previous client migrations to assist with lessons learned in the delivery of each phase. The end-to-end project delivery of each phase was directly managed by the Speculo team, matrix managing suppliers and internal teams to deliver the required project scopes.
Project management of the various project phases to bring together the businesses with minimal disruption to users including;
- User device re-imaging of 750 users
- Migration of all email and One-drive data
- Migration of MS teams and Sharepoint data
- IA Governance model design and implementation
- Communication plan design and execution
- Service Transition Plan
Project coordination of the communication and migration plans to manage the user expectations and cutover plans.
Results
C+C have now all employees running on a new single MS365 tenant with a standard device image, and appropriate policies and controls in place for contractors. There are standard MS teams templates for the creation of different site types, and a Sharepoint architecture which represents the key areas of the business, with appropriate rules for storing data within for easy content search according to user permissions. All employees can collaborate with each other and see free/busy information, and communicate over MS teams chat/voice etc. External sharing rules/tools are in place to provide for customer access to MS team and Sharepoint data, and there is a standardised model for the delivery of IT services back to the business for ongoing Business-As-Usual support.
- Speculo transferred our extensive experience of previous customer migrations
- Speculo helped C+C realise direct cost savings from licensing and a consolidated set of support elements
- C+C business disruption was minimal due to effective planning and communication/stakeholder management
- Coaching/mentoring of internal IT team and professional service team members with delivery approach
- Effective project budgeting/cost tracking throughout the process
- C+C did not need to hire full-time contractors at additional costs, meaning they only paid for the project services they used and consumed
- Benefits realisation planning and execution for each phase
- Lessons learned management