Avocado helped a major bank move around 47,000 users across five divisions onto a cloud-based collaboration service, in waves of 1,500 users, while keeping the deployment schedule on track and disruption to a minimum.
About our client
Our client, a major bank, engaged Avocado to provide program, business analysis, testing and change communication services for the rollout of a cloud-based Microsoft collaboration service, replacing legacy messaging and collaboration platforms across five banking divisions. The $30 million, 21-month program aimed to cut the cost of running multiple messaging systems, end the problems of keeping them running side by side, and give staff a better everyday experience: a single company-wide directory, reliable scheduling and easy meeting booking, and a foundation for future collaboration tools.
The challenge
Moving an entire bank onto a new platform meant migrating around 1,500 users with each technical deployment, across five divisions running very different technology.
- Communications at scale. Each deployment needed a communications plan coordinated across user departments, so every group knew when and how it would move.
- Diverse technical platforms. Unresolved technical issues across the bank's varied platforms meant some users couldn't move with their department. They had to be told promptly which later deployment they would join.
- Testing across divisions. Testing requirements had to be analysed against the requirements traceability matrix for every division, to surface technical and schedule risks early.
- Change team experience. The business change team had limited experience with an IT program of this size and complexity, particularly in targeting communications and handling exceptions.
Our approach
- Governance and visibility. Avocado provided program governance across the workstreams, with weekly stakeholder and program reporting so issues were visible early.
- Deployment readiness. We managed preparation for each deployment, including user management, communications and engagement with key business representatives, backed by a detailed business implementation schedule and deployment plan covering both business and IT readiness.
- Requirements and testing. We maintained the requirements traceability matrix and prepared the test strategy, infrastructure, system integration and disaster recovery test plans and reports, managing the schedule and risks for all testing.
- Technical support for application owners. We helped application owners integrate their systems with the new messaging platform.
- Command centre and triage. We ran command centre operations during deployments, provided triage afterwards and managed the decommissioning of the old systems.
The Result
- The bank kept its deployment schedule on track.
- The new platform delivered the intended benefits while reducing the total cost of messaging and calendaring across around 47,000 users.
- Avocado mentored the business change team, giving it a roadmap for communicating with user departments and a way to track deployment status.
- Technical and business risks were identified early, keeping disruption to planned deployment targets to a minimum.
- Every desktop and device configuration was thoroughly tested, reducing the chance of emergency back-outs.
- Lessons from each deployment were fed into the next, improving the deployment timetable as the program progressed.
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