Case Study:
IT Assessment – Project Readiness Assessment
Background
A $7 billion worldwide provider of insurance, retirement services, and asset management was preparing for the rollout of a long-term virtual workforce strategy to complement the current in-office approach. They wanted an IT assessment of workforce mobility to determine technical readiness for having groups of people working from home.
What We Did
End-users from two pilot work-from-home groups were interviewed along with members from each infrastructure technology group. Interview results were shared with technical team members in a Rapid Envisioning Session (RES), where a set of shortcomings and risks were identified. Subsequent meetings with specific technical teams yielded proposed solutions which were then validated with the larger technical team. Results were shared with sponsors and senior management.
What We Achieved
Support turned out to be the key issue as most calls to the Help Desk were simply forwarded to more senior technical team members. The Help Desk (outsourced) had not been properly trained to support remote access technologies.
In an effort to improve Help Desk support, a member of the Remote Services group was promoted to manage a Help Desk team, bringing important knowledge and process. The Help Desk began to resolve remote access issues, engineers were freed up to improve the scalability of the environment, and the initiative went from reactive to proactive.
Our financial analysis helped senior management better understand and plan for the real costs of a virtual desktop environment.
Summary
Industry: Financial Services
Scope: IT Infrastructure-wide exposure
Impact: Virtual workforce initiative could move forward, IT remote computing went from reactive to proactive, and engineering projects were able to be completed.
Duration: 2 months
Harvard Partners Skillsets
- Business analysis
- Project management
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