FORTUNE 100 Company Organizational Change Management—Office 365

Overview

Our client, a FORTUNE 100 company, wished to identify over 1,100 existing Office 365 users among its 10,000+ employees who could be migrated to lower-cost licenses without detracting from the employees’ productivity. Our client requested our assistance with a project to identify candidates for migration and to structure organization communications for the change.

Impact

We helped to minimize any negative effects on productivity relating to this change through up-front comprehensive analysis of which users could be migrated with the least impact to their day-to-day work. Because the lower-cost licenses provide more limited services—including no access to desktop versions of Office applications and much smaller email and file storage—the potential negative impacts were substantial.

Process

Our impact analysis focused on in-depth use of Active Directory tools, telemetry for Office 365 and custom scripts run against public drives and user mailboxes. The process of running these scripts required close coordination between Concurrency’s team and our client’s own project manager from its internal IT team. The process was iterative in that we applied one tool, then another and another; through that process, the list of candidate users dropped from 10,000+ to 7,700 then 5,600 then to 2,501. Eventually we identified a list of 1,300 candidate users to present to executive decision-makers.

Communication

Not surprisingly, announcing the loss of some productivity features can provoke a negative response, even when those features are not needed day-to-day by users. Through a carefully structured communications campaign, we helped minimize that potential angst. We crafted both messages to users and materials to support those communications.

Training

Among the materials we created were user-training guides to ensure users understood how to access services, including their files and email, through an online portal. In this case, our client implemented the actual training, using the materials we created.

Conclusion

The transition moved forward to a successful conclusion. This project is a good example of how by working closely together with a client, we can help minimize the potential negatives from a change that’s necessary but may be unpopular.