Pillsbury Law transitions from OS Migrations to Business-as-Usual  deployments

Challenges

Upon joining Pillsbury Law as their new PMO Director, Tom discovered the lengthy and labor-intensive task of migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7. The previous migration had relied heavily on manual processes and spreadsheets, lacking the capability to centrally collect and manage project information. Consequently the team had to conduct numerous interviews and coordinate over a thousand users manually. 

Recognising the need for a more strategic approach, Tom sought to implement self-service and automation, supported by the appropriate tools to execute his vision. Turning to Juriba, he aimed to address six key pain points, all with the goal of ensuring a seamless migration experience. 

Improve user experience. The firm knows that its people are its greatest asset and IT treats them as VIPs. So creating a smooth, consistent, and pleasant user experience was the number one priority. The firm’s high profile lawyers and their staff are focused on client work, and do not have the extra time to talk with IT about their OS migration. This meant minimizing unnecessary user involvement, such as lengthy interviews to create user profiles.

Run multiple projects at the same time. Because the lawyers' devices were due for a hardware refresh, the IT team decided to provide new computers at the same time as the OS upgrade. Therefore, Tom needed to find an IT Transformation tool that was able to manage multiple projects side-by-side.

Reduce manual labor. The previous migration was very labor-intensive which slowed the project down. In the past, floorwalkers manually recorded answers to 21 questions, e.g., the preferred screen resolution or which applications the users want/need — taking up 10-30 minutes of users' time.

Streamline employee communication & enable self-service. While IT wanted to keep unnecessary user involvement to a minimum, the team wanted to encourage their voluntary involvement by leveraging Self-Service and IT automation. He knew that — without a proper tool that automated and tracks responses based on an aggressive schedule — it would be difficult, if not impossible, to effectively manage change at a pace required by firm leadership.

Centralized Command & Control. Since the firm has office locations all over the world, Tom wanted a central command and control center that allowed everyone on the team to immediately see the exact scope or status of the project without having to compile dozens of spreadsheets.

Business-as-usual capabilities. Since Microsoft's modern OS requires frequent updates, the IT team wanted to ensure that the tool they chose would be able to manage future updates using repeatable and scalable processes in a Business-as-Usual manner.

Central Command & Control for faster deployment

The migration started with domestic offices and was then deployed internationally, with over 90% of the migration being completed within 4 months.

The team had to manage 12 separate dependency tasks per user: 5 for Pre-Migration, 3 for Training, 4 for Deployment — each of which were fully managed and tracked within Juriba's Digital Platform Conductor.

Because of the DPC's central command and control capability, the IT staff at Pillsbury Law was able to understand from a project management point of view where things were in real-time. For example:

• How many machines were deployed today vs. yesterday,
• How many users had to be rescheduled,
• How many laptops needed to be ordered for each office,
• How many were ready to be shipped once the user has completed his or her training.

Throughout the process, Pilsbury was able to cross-check with drop sheets generated automatically by Juriba.

As they completed a milestone through the workflow, they would record the progress of each step within the tool, turning the user status from red (not ready) to amber (in progress), and then green (ready).