Overview

One of the largest nonprofit healthcare organizations in the United States looked to Oakwood’s Cloud Team to assist in moving nearly 33,000 users utilizing 15,000 devices from AirWatch to Intune to enable IT to better manage employee access to corporate data and applications.

An aggressive timeline was sought by this, already, Microsoft-centric organization as their AirWatch licensing was coming up for renewal and Oakwood would deliver on this project covering a variety of devices and operating systems over a phased approach spanning several months.

This carefully managed migration would need to minimize adverse effects on the user and increase adoption across the organization.

Business Challenge

Similar to many other migrations of this size and scope, meeting deadlines would prove to be a challenge. Clients often take for granted the time and effort involved with moving this many devices that often require numerous touch points with individual users. Carefully balancing a seamless migration with an impending contract renewal date with the client’s current MDM provider would need to be front and center for the Oakwood Team. The second challenge Oakwood would encounter is the exercise around change management. Based on past experiences of this magnitude, they knew they would be working with both technical and non-technical users. These non-technical users were going to be required to make changes to their devices they were not accustomed to. To reduce user stress, downtime, and inbound call troubleshooting, the Oakwood Team found it critical to test the instructions in their communications extensively – making sure they are specific to the OS of the client’s users’ phones, tablets, laptops, and other critical devices.

Solution

The Oakwood Team leaned on past experiences and knowledge objects at the onset of the delivery in order to establish clear benchmarks while keeping needed completion date in mind.

The Team needed to first identify all devices in the client’s user-ecosystem to best prioritize the move and to ensure incremental device counts are met. What was originally thought to be 10,000 devices, it was soon discovered that an additional 5,000 devices were not being managed and would have to be factored into this effort. Complexity increased with awareness of single devices that needed to be shared amongst a variety of team members.

After documenting devices and respective operating systems, expectations were solidified with the client in terms of who and how many devices would be serviced during the first phase of this multiphase rollout. The first phase would consist of a more deliberate approach as the Oakwood Team adapted to user questions and concerns. As any known issues were surfaced, and ultimately mitigated, the Oakwood Team could then scale up their efforts in later phases of the project to help expedite this effort.

The Oakwood Team knew going into this project that it would have an initial impact on user expectations and habits they have of accessing critical data. In many respects, success of this project would be based on minimizing user downtime and widespread adoption across the organization.

Oakwood sought to mitigate these risks by developing a step-by-step condition-based logical intranet portal that users could access for clear implementation instructions. Not only could this portal be used as a self-service repository for device instructions, but it would also help minimize the reliance on the dedicated internal Oakwood Team staffed to field inbound requests for troubleshooting by providing 24×7 service.

Conclusion

A project like this is not without its challenges. However, with proper experience, planning and thorough communication – the Oakwood Team was able to deliver the result on-time and within the expected budget and helped further consolidate our client’s IT services with Microsoft.

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