When an iconic clothing retail brand acquired a well known Australian brand in 2019, the business was excited for the journey ahead. However, as the two brands amalgamated, the organisation encountered a significant challenge: How could thousands of staff, using different IT systems, work together seamlessly? With collaboration issues escalating, the retail group reached out to Inde with a simple yet complex request: to unite all its staff on a single productivity platform.
Ensuring a unified platform is crucial when growing a business with multiple brands and diverse teams. While typically manageable in a usual scenario, introducing an acquisition of another retail brand and things become complicated. With different IT platforms in play and staff dispersed across multiple different geographies and brands, achieving cohesion became the foremost objective for the IT team.
Since amalgamation, the business’ leadership team had noticed a significant drop in productivity for those juggling multiple brands and having to switch in-between Microsoft tenancies. What should be simple tasks such as booking a meeting room or accessing a colleague’s calendar became a hassle, causing staff to get frustrated and tangled up in inefficiencies.
Having worked on previous networking projects together, the client’s IT Infrastructure & Operations Manager reached out to Greg Riach, Canterbury Regional Director at Inde, to brief in the project and get underway with unifying users at the group.
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Initially, the task appeared to be a huge challenge, involving the merger of nearly 1000 mailboxes and an equivalent number of users into a unified system.
Inde’s ‘can-do’ work ethic meant the team tackled the challenge head-on, developing a customised execution plan and coordinating the necessary steps for migrating to a consolidated Microsoft 365 environment. This encompassed everything from the migration of user identities, email, and OneDrive storage, right through to the provisioning of Microsoft Teams for both users and offices globally. Additionally, the transfer of business-critical Power BI items from the old tenancy to the new one meant a contingency plan needed to be in place from the Inde team to ensure continuation of these services throughout the migration.
After collaborating with the client’s project team and presenting various migration strategies, a phased migration and merger pilot was chosen as the preferred approach due to its minimal disruption to the business.
This approach allowed Inde and the client to take the learnings from the initial pilot migration and make adjustments before the wider user migration. The need for more in-depth change management including additional user communications, and visible stakeholder leadership were identified as key success factors to the project.
"During our pilot migration, we merged yet another of the client’s acquired brands to the greater tenancy. This pilot phase provided us all with several key learnings and successes, which we then applied to the migration with the original briefed acquisition brands. Using these learnings from phase one of the migration, it was an opportunity to minimise familiar hurdles, fine-tune our methods, and ensure the major migration process was smooth sailing from the word go," said Greg.
Approximately 80 per cent of the staff across the client’s business remained unaffected by the migration, while the remaining 20 percent, who operated across different platforms and brands, fully embraced the transition.
"We encountered some challenges along the way, but our comprehensive risk management sessions between the Inde Project Delivery team and the client ensured we were well-equipped with strategies to tackle various scenarios. Additionally, we had a readily accessible playbook, which we collaborated on, that staff could refer to.” said Greg.
While the project had a run time of approximately 12 months, a lot of this time was spent in the preparation and planning stages to minimise any end user impact. Globally, the client’s brands are a 24*7 retail operation, with stringent change freeze periods during peak sales periods. As such, windows in which to undertake the technical migrations were few and far between.
The considerable planning and preparation paid dividends for the actual technical execution, with the acquired business migration completed in an impressively short span of just three months, a notable achievement for both Inde and the client.
For employees, the impact on user experience has been refreshing - employees no longer grapple with the complexities of navigating between disparate systems and databases or encountering hurdles in everyday tasks such as booking meeting rooms or communicating with colleagues via Teams. Now, they seamlessly collaborate across various applications, saving valuable time and enhancing productivity, a crucial factor for the company’s staff retention strategy.
Moreover, the migration facilitated the streamlining of software licenses, resulting in notable cost savings and bolstering data security, now consolidated in a single location.
Since the migration's completion, the amount of time the IT team had to dedicate to multiple tenancies was greatly reduced, allowing them instead to devote more attention to managing one unified tenancy.
The client continues to partner with Inde across a number of their critical projects, with Inde providing ongoing maintenance and support to much of their key core infrastructure.
“We’re extremely happy with the outcomes that this project delivered , and it was a great learning moment for both of our teams. We look forward to continuing our support and collaborating on future projects,” said Greg.