With the bulk of the Office 365 migrations complete, four of the original eight-member Field Team moved over on June 19 to assist the Service Desk with Fall Rush support. Alexandra Tocchi, Brian Reilly, Rajita Maharjan and Timothy Shelley will work for Ingrid Camacho’s team until September 15. Ben Grace, the fifth and last remaining member of the Field Team, will continue to assist with go-live-day support through the July migrations. He leaves ITS on July 21 to attend graduate school at Boston College.
Scott McCall, who has led the Field Team along with Anne Vail since migrations began in February, shared some of his reflections on the Field Team.
Working with the team: It’s been a pleasure watching the team evolve from role playing possible field scenarios to being the go-to-source for typical conditions in go-live-day support. Anne Vail’s support and mastering of the documentation/reporting tools was also a great learning experience, providing the backbone this team was built around.
The camaraderie of the group and the members’ skill level: This team has a diverse mix of backgrounds that span the globe. They come from as far away as Nepal to Slovakia geographically (a multi-lingual Field Team!), and brought professional skills from a wide variety of industry outside of the University environment. The team works closely with one another and gets each other’s back without hesitation.
An interesting stat: Our Field Team documented 1,987 user interactions out of 13,599 total migrations, or saw 15 percent of all migrated users to-date.
A memorable customer compliment: Kudos from migrating departments have been plentiful and greatly appreciated. Perhaps the most meaningful have been the unsolicited gratitude expressed by respective deans’ offices on go-live days. Specifically, the law school’s dean’s office sent someone to catch the team members before they left to say how much the on-site presence was noticed and appreciated. This was early in the schedule and really boosted the team’s confidence.
Noteworthy performance: The team’s resilience each go-live day and the cheerful disposition maintained through some stressful situations makes me most proud of the work we’ve done.
A surprising accomplishment: Navigating the Office 365 environment and actually utilizing the expanded tools and features exceeded our expectations. The team created their own documentation in Office 365 and provided support standards distributed campus-wide.
The importance of having the team structured in this way: It was very important to have a team strictly dedicated to migration support. In fact, it might be the only migration team that didn’t also have primary job duties to juggle around migrations. This enabled the Field Team the time to dive deep into all the mysteries of the University’s journey to the cloud.
The team’s contribution to the project: This is such a large project with so many people doing the bulk of work behind the scenes, but our task – the customer-facing element – was identified early as imperative to overall success. This team performed exactly how we asked them to from the beginning; professional, courteous, respectful of each user’s time, while always keeping the numbers/reporting top-of-mind. They were always prompt for 7:30 a.m. starts and learned their way around campus quickly to be self-sufficient. Their success, most as first-timers on campus, far exceeded most expectations.