Bringing the People with You

“I have been working in IT within the education sector for over nine years and have worked on many projects with various universities and colleges. With more technology changes coming through, more demands on IT from end users, more shadow IT and smaller IT teams with smaller budgets, there are many challenges that IT Directors and Managers are trying to prioritise and solve. Now more than ever there needs to be a focus on evolution not revolution.

Of the projects I have delivered and the customers I have worked with, there have been very few that have not had to ask their end users to change something which will usually affect their way of working. In today’s world people are more open to changes in their personal life – app updates, OS updates, new apps and so on are taken as a way of life, but in work some people will still resist or refuse change.

One of the biggest projects I have been involved with was moving a university from their existing online email service, with other products attached, to Microsoft Office 365. The biggest issue they came up against, on top of the actual migration of data from one cloud to another, was that staff were initially resistant and would keep using their old service. This represented many issues for the university in terms of data management and standardisation.

We offered many ways to facilitate this such as:

• Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) – what is Office 365 and what can it do
• Continuous Professional Development (CPD) – teaching how to use the Microsoft tools
• Office 365 Readiness Assessment – are you technically ready?

In addition to this, we supplied recorded webinars, videos, marketing, events and more.

We are the 2019 Microsoft Global Modern Workplace Transformation Partner of the Year and a lot of what we do, that that led to us winning this award, has come from working in collaboration with our customers to help them drive not only technology on the system but also adoption by the users.

Our ethos and culture here at Phoenix is to work with our customers. We want to make sure you succeed in your projects by making sure the technology is ready, the people are ready, and the full potential is reached.“