I just want milk that tastes like real milk QUTs Migration of Staff - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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• #THETA2015

“I just want milk that tastes like real milk”

QUT’s Migration of Staff Email to the Cloud Michael Boyle – Assoc Director, Infrastructure Services Nathan Howard – Project Manager

Email as a commodity

• Everyone likes it slightly different and uses it for a

variety of purposes

• Few large providers and some small ones
• It’s “Just email” but is a critical service
• A “free” service doesn’t mean a free implementation
• As a commodity service, reputation is currency.

QUT’s Journey (1/2)

2012

Q3 Q4

• Proposal for funding
• Formation of a working party
• Comparison of Google Apps and

Microsoft Office 365

• Discovery pilot with Office 365

2013

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4

• Survey and focus groups – staff

attitudes towards email

• Appointment of PM
• Development of initial User Profiles
• Formation of Technical Reference Group
• Requirements gathering
• Survey of other universities
• Commence analysis of policies, processes,

interfaces and technologies

• Commence risk legal analysis
• Formation of User Reference Group
• Completion of risk legal analysis
• Start of contract negotiations
• Faculty, institute and divisional impact analysis
• Socialisation of impacts and proposed solution

for students / HDR students

• Finalisation of contract negotiations

QUT’s Journey (2/2)

2015

Q1 Q2

2014

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4

• Detailed planning
• Initial design and

approach

• Project resource onboarding
• Detailed design
• Change readiness planning

Phase 2: Service Transition Phase 1: Preparation Phase 2: Service Transition

• Student email relay

removal

• HDR account migration
• Cloud Identity Alignment
• Staff migration preparation
• Commence staff migrations
• Continued staff migrations
• Transition infrastructure decommissioning
• Project close

Project planning: Advice

• A. Analogous projects are difficult to find.
• B. Expect the project to take at least 9 months.
• C. Expect a constant evolution of the cloud service

during the project.

• D. Expect to apply continuous improvement to the

rollout/transition process.

What kind of milk do you have now?

Source: http://almondmilk.net/almond-milk-vs-milk/

Understanding the current environment

QUT Starting State

Onsite Service Cloud Service

• 55,000 active students
• >200,000 student alumni
• Separate onsite and cloud

passwords

• Outlook 2007 for 50% of users
• 23,000 staff, visitor, managed and

resource accounts

• 2,200 HDR accounts
• Email relay for systems
• Redirection relay to a student’s

chosen 3rd party mailbox

• Separate email archive
• Dynamic list management
• 6 physical, 41 VMs, 180TB of

allocated space 32TB mailbox data Growth of 500MB / month

QUT End-State

Onsite Service Cloud Service

• All staff, visitors, students and

alumni

• Integrated, searchable email

archive

• Same password as onsite services
• Self-service for redirection to
• ther mailboxes
• Email relay for systems
• Dynamic list management
• 8 VMs

Current environment: Advice

• A. Spend as much time as needed to understand

the current technical environment, system usage, metrics and costs.

• B. Understand your user profiles/scenarios and

related business processes.

• C. You may not be able to do A and B until you

start migration.

Pasteurisation

Legal analysis and contract negotiation

I care about privacy

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

Legal analysis and contracts: QUT Journey

• Complex hierarchy of Microsoft contracts,

Terms of Service, CAUDIT amendments, and legal frameworks

• Quarterly evolution of the ToS
• Qld privacy laws and email offshoring of data
• Records management
• Successfully negotiated contract amendment

addressing privacy and licensing

Legal analysis and contracts: Advice

• A. Understand all the current contracts and get

legal advice in order to ask the right questions.

• B. Decide the business imperatives and

negotiate on these.

Homogenisation

Staff engagement and expectations

Source: http://www.albertamilk.com/ask-dairy-farmer/why-is-milk-homogenized/

Staff engagement and expectations: QUT Journey

• Engaged a full-time Change and Communications

Officer.

• Staff forums on all campuses to explain the issues,

process, timeline.

• Adjusted our user profiles, communications and

support model through the migration.

• Each organisational unit/faculty has a different

personality and required a different style of engagement.

• Most users had a small impact. Small group of highly

impacted users spread across the university.

Staff engagement and expectations: Advice

A. Perform an organisational change risk assessment to determine your change strategy and use a model (Prosci). B. Expect people not to understand their current state and to be disengaged (until they are impacted). C. Communication suggestions:

1. Use a ‘preferred sender’ for communications to organisational areas 2. Use email for most people, paper for awareness, face-to-face for highly impacted users 3. Prepare for some people who will be highly impacted 4. Prepare early communications collateral and FAQs.

D. Balance speed of migration with attention to people for a smoother transition. E. Demonstrate empathy with highly impacted people.

The supermarket dairy aisle

Service relationship with a commodity provider

Source: http://www.healthandlovepage.com/stop-drinking-low-fat-milk/

Service relationship: QUT Journey

• Experienced a standard, incident-based service support

relationship despite providing advanced notice of future project events.

• Proactive support and advice from Microsoft

dependant on the knowledge and ability of the individual – varies greatly.

• (ITIL) Change management from CSP is minimal
• Licensing vs subscription
• Technical partners reach within Microsoft was

dependant on personal relationships.

• Support for the online environment not included in

agreement.

Service relationship: Advice

• A. Pay attention and understand the impacts to

your service and users.

• B. Develop a great relationship with the CSP

Technical Account Manager. Develop and understand techniques for escalation within CSP.

• C. Support responses will be approached by the

CSP as reactive incidents, without view of the wider project context.

• D. Purchase sufficient Premier Support hours as

part of the project budget.

Amino acids and peptide bonds

Technical Issues

Technical Issues: QUT Journey

Key technical design challenges (service):

• Authentication (ADFS vs Shibboleth)
• Upstream services and email addresses changes
• Active directory sizes and object limits
• Two tenancies behaving differently.

Key technical hurdles (project):

• Synchronisation of identities with the cloud
• Exchange hybrid configuration on-campus and cloud
• Service performance for the end-user at the desktop.

Technical Issues: Advice

• A. Engage a partner who has a Premier Support

Partner agreement, expect to pay for it.

• B. Extended time between CSP technician and

university technician produces the best problem resolution outcomes.

• C. Explain the business impact and client pain.
• D. Expect to re-tune the current client desktop

environment and engage both front office and back office technicians.

Cheese and Ice Cream

Leveraging other cloud products

http://cargocollective.com/jackyong/Care-2-Share

Other O365 products: QUT’s Journey

• Products changed features and branding throughout

the life of the project (SkyDrive > OneDrive, Office > OfficeProPlus, Lync > Skype for Business).

• Although presented as seamless items to ‘turn on’,

each service/product may have hidden complexities including:

• Licensing
• Legal issues
• Identity management
• Integration
• Organisational change management and messaging.

Other O365 products: Advice

• A. Consider each service separately with a

separate business case and well considered design approach.

• B. Understand your entitlements; consider

changes from licensing to subscriptions carefully.