Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/18157
that fed success. These benefits had the concrete impact of generating positive attitudes and sentiments that spread to the user population and contributed to the success of the rollout. Attitude is indeed contagious. ORGANIZE AND CENTRALIZE It is critical to be organized — extremely organized. Regardless of your method or application choice, you will need centralized, up-to-date project information and tracking available for real- time sharing across your team. Our team utilized a SharePoint site, customized to the project needs, and additionally housed within the site a comprehensive OneNote 2010 file that became the lifeblood of the project. A Word document simply will not work — at least not by itself. You need to choose a communication mechanism that is dynamic, comprehensive and flexible, and that can be easily accessed by everyone on the team. Beyond the obvious tasks, timelines and meeting reporting. It even served as a distribution list for sending targeted updates and tips only to those folks already affected by the upgrade. “Blatantly obvious as a critical success factor for any project is timely and effective communication.” TIME, PLAN AND CHECK During our upgrade to Windows7/Office 2010 we went beyond a basic checklist and combined tasks into a timetable. The result was a Timeline and Checklist. This combination was absolutely critical to keep us on task and on time, especially given our aggressive plan to upgrade an office each week, until the entire 10-office firm was complete. There were deployment tasks that spanned six weeks, which meant we had several checklists in play concurrently. Without them, our execution would have suffered. The checklist itself was an accumulation of learning points, discoveries and final touches that contributed to a successful, well-adopted migration — a migration that could now be repeated with relative ease. Additionally, for each phase of our migration, minutes, the most critical data we housed on our SharePoint site was our User Information List. It included every person in our firm, their hardware models, upgrade status, customer service notes, scheduled upgrade dates/times, IT persons responsible and more. We used it for everything including resource planning, scheduling and progress 12 Project Management ILTA White Paper a logistical plan was developed and followed. The plan consisted of a OneNote file that broke down every component of the plan for the benefit of the team. It contained the checklist, tasks and assignments, pertinent links, instructions, staffing roles, user lists, scheduling, communication guidelines, follow-up activities, tracking and more.