Collaboration is a sore point of traditional office tools. When ten people work on a file at the same time, more time and effort is spent not on editing, but on searching for changes and their authors. This is complicated by the many applications that are not always compatible. One way to solve this problem is to switch to cloud office suites. There are not so many of them, and we will tell you how we overcame the conservatism of Forex Club employees and were able to transfer a distributed company with hundreds of offices to G Suite in just a couple of months.
Why did you decide to move
Forex Club is usually remembered in the context of online trading in foreign exchange rates. But this company works with several types of currency instruments in different countries of the world. Because of this, it has a very complex IT infrastructure with its own platform for clients.
At the time of our acquaintance, the back-office of the company used several different platforms and applications. The main working tool for most of the employees was the Microsoft office suite and mail on Zimbra. Above it all, there was a superstructure of additional storage, backups, antivirus, numerous connectors and integrations, as well as Microsoft and Zimbra license management with periodic audits.
It was costly for the Forex Club IT department to maintain this system. The complex infrastructure required the lease of a large number of servers, DRP plans in case these servers went down or the Internet connection failed, and backups. To ensure trouble-free operation over time, a special department of administrators was formed, who still had the task of license audits.
Due to the abundance of different programs, problems arose for ordinary employees of the Forex Club. Without version tracking tools, it was difficult to find the author of some corrections and the final version of the text or table.
In an effort to reduce maintenance costs, Forex Club was looking for a way to solve the same problems easier. This is where our interaction began.
Finding an alternative
To implement full-fledged collaboration, it was necessary to change the approach itself - to move away from local storage to the cloud. Forex Club started looking for a common cloud solution for all office applications. There were two candidates: Office 365 and G Suite.
Office 365 was a priority, as many Microsoft licenses were purchased from Forex Club. But Office 365 only brings some of the office suite's features to the cloud. Users still need to download the application from their personal account and use it to work with documents according to the old scheme: send and resave copies with version indexes.
G Suite by Google Cloud has more collaboration features and is cheaper. In the case of Microsoft products, you would have to use an Enterprise Agreement, and this is a completely different level of spending (even with the purchased software). And the implementation of G Suite with our help was carried out under the Google program, which compensated large customers for the costs of switching to the company's services.
It was planned to transfer most of the services used by employees to G Suite:
- Calendar and email (Gmail and Google Calendar);
- Notes (Google Keep);
- Chat and online conferences (Chat, Hangouts);
- Office suite and survey generator (Google Docs, Google Forms);
- Shared storage (GDrive).
Overcoming negativity
The implementation of any tool, even the most convenient one, always faces negative end-users. The main reason is conservatism, as people do not want to change anything and get used to new approaches to work. Complicating the situation is the specific perception of web presence as simply browsing sites (but not working on those sites) that is common among non-IT employees. They just didn't understand how to work with it.
Dmitry Ostroverkhov was responsible for the project implementation from the Forex CLub side. He controlled the implementation stages, collected user feedback and prioritized tasks. Joint training, interviews with employees, explanations of the company's rules made it easier for us to get started.
The main task of Softline in this project was to train users and system administrators and provide technical support at the first stage. We explained how the product should work through a series of training sessions. In total, we conducted 15 trainings for 4 hours. The first is in front of the pilot, for the system administrators who set the stage for the transformation. And the next ones are for ordinary employees.
As part of the main training program, we focused on the benefits that compensated end users for the difficulty of getting used to the new tool. And at the end of each training, employees could come up with their questions, which removed the pitfalls at the beginning of the work.
Although Forex Club conducts training seminars for its own clients, the company could not launch G Suite training on its own due to the lack of teachers with the necessary competencies. To assess the impact of our trainings, Forex Club conducted surveys of students before training and some time after it. The first survey showed a mostly negative perception of the coming changes. The second is, on the contrary, the rise of the positive. People began to understand that this applies to their work.
Pilot Office
The project began at the end of 2017, when ten system administrators switched to G Suite. These people had to become pioneers who identified the pros and cons of the solution and set the stage for transformation. We took into account their feedback and recommendations and in January 2018 chose a medium-sized branch with a local system administrator for the first trial transition of non-IT employees.
The transition was made at the same time. Yes, it is difficult for people to switch to new tools, so with the choice between a cloud solution and a desktop application, users will lean towards a more familiar desktop and slow down global upgrade plans. So after completing the training for the pilot office, we quickly moved everyone to G Suite. For the first couple of weeks, there was still some resistance, the local system administrator coped with it, who explained and showed all the difficult moments.
Following the pilot office, we completely transferred the entire Forex Club IT department to G Suite.
Changing the branch network
After analyzing the experience of the pilot project, together with the Forex Club IT department, we developed a plan for the transition of the rest of the company. It was originally planned that the process would take place in two stages. At the first stage, we wanted to train only the most loyal Forex Club employees who will promote the project in their offices and help their colleagues move to the new platform within the second stage. To select "evangelists" in the company, we conducted a survey, the results of which exceeded all expectations: about half of the entire Forex Club responded. Then we decided not to stretch the process and skipped the βimplementation through employeesβ stage.
As in the pilot project, the head offices were first migrated, where there is a local system administrator - he helped to cope with the difficulties that arose. In each office, the transition to new tools was preceded by training. Training had to be planned according to a flexible schedule that took into account different time zones and work schedules. For example, for offices in Kazakhstan and China, trainings had to start at 5 am Moscow time (by the way, G Suite works fine in China, no matter what).
Following the head offices, the branch network moved to G Suite - about 100 points. The peculiarity of the last stage of the project was that these branches are mainly staffed by salespeople who work a lot with spreadsheets. For them, we conducted trainings for two weeks to help transfer data.
At the same time, our specialists worked βin the rearβ of support for the Forex Club itself, since immediately after the transition to G Suite, the number of calls to technical support increased as expected. The peak of applications fell on the transition of the branch network, but gradually the number of applications began to decrease. Applications for office products and e-mail, software license management, servers and network equipment, as well as for backup communication channels, were especially reduced. That is, the implementation reduced the load on the first line of support and back-office.
In total, it took about two months to transfer the offices: in February 2018, work was completed in the head offices, and in March, throughout the entire branch network.
Pitfalls
The biggest problem was the speed of email migration. It took 1 second to transfer one email from Zimbra to Gmail using IMAP Sync. About 700 employees work in a hundred Forex Club offices, and each of them has thousands of letters (in total they serve more than 2 million clients). So to speed up the migration, we used the G Suite Migration Tool, with which the process of copying emails went faster.
Data from calendars and tasks did not need to be migrated. Although there were some solutions in the old infrastructure, they were not fully used by employees. For example, corporate calendars were implemented as a portal on Bitrix, which is inconvenient, so employees had their own tools, and employees were engaged in data transfer on their own.
Also, users were in charge of transferring operational documents (we are talking only about data on current work - a different solution is used for the company's knowledge base). There were no questions here. Just at some point, an administrative line was drawn - the responsibility for the information stored locally was transferred to the users themselves, while the IT department was already monitoring the safety and security of data on Google Drive.
Unfortunately, not all workflows were matched in G Suite. For example, the general mailboxes that Forex Club employees are used to using do not have filters in Gmail, so it is difficult to find a specific letter. There was a similar difficulty with SSO authorization in Google Chat, but this problem was solved through a request to Google support.
The main problems for users were related to the fact that Google services do not yet have some of the functions of competitors, for example, the same Skype or Office 365. Hangouts only allows you to call, Google Chat lacks quoting, and Google Sheets lacks support for Microsoft Excel macros.
In addition, Microsoft and Google Cloud products approach table editing tools differently. Word files containing tables sometimes opened in Google Docs with incorrect formatting.
As they got used to the new infrastructure, some of the difficulties were solved through alternative approaches. For example, instead of macros in spreadsheets, scripts are used, which seemed even more convenient for Forex Club employees. It was not possible to find an analogue only for the financial department of Forex Club, which deals with 1C reports (with scripts, complex formatting). Therefore, he switched to Google Sheet only in the part of the collaboration. For other documents, the office suite (Excel) is still used.
In total, Forex Club left about 10% of Microsoft Office licenses. For such projects, this is normal practice: a minority of employees use the advanced features of office suites, so the rest easily accept a replacement.
It should be noted that large-scale transformations have not been carried out in the rest of the infrastructure. Forex Club has not abandoned Jira and Confluence, although it has implemented Google Keep for operational tasks. To integrate Jira and Confluence with G Suite, we've deployed plugins to quickly transfer data. The monitoring system has been preserved, as well as many additional tools: Trello, Teamup, CRM, Metrics, AWS, etc. Naturally, system administrators remained in the branches.
Chromebook Experiment
Looking for a way to cut costs, the Forex Club envisioned shifting everyone to Chromebook-based mobile workspaces. The device itself is extremely cheap, and using cloud services it was possible to quickly deploy a workplace on it.
We tested mobile workstations on a small group of 25 users in the sales department. The employees of this department did not have tasks that would prevent working only through the web, so for them this migration should have gone unnoticed. But according to the results of the test, it turned out that the hardware of an inexpensive Chromebook is not enough for the correct operation of all Forex Club corporate applications. And more expensive models that would fit in terms of technical parameters turned out to be commensurate in cost with classic Windows-based laptops. In the end, the project was abandoned.
What has changed with the advent of G Suite
Contrary to all prejudices and mistrust, already 3 months after the trainings, 80% of employees in surveys noted that G Suite really made it easier for them to work with documents. After the transition, the mobility of employees increased, who began to work more with wearable devices:
Mobile device usage statistics according to Forex Club
Google Forms has become very popular. Within departments, they allow you to quickly conduct surveys that previously had to use the mail, collecting results manually. Most of the questions and complaints were caused by the transition to Google Chat and Hangouts Meet, as they generally have fewer functions, but their use made it possible to abandon many instant messengers within the company.
The results of the project were formulated by Dmitry Ostroverkhov, with whom we worked: βThe project reduced Forex Club's IT infrastructure costs and simplified its support. A whole layer of process maintenance tasks has disappeared, as these issues are resolved on the side of Google. Now all services can be configured remotely, they are supported by a couple of Google administrators, and the IT department has freed up time and resources for other things.β
Source: habr.com