Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/18157
change. When you play with a person’s phone, it’s a pretty big deal. Add to that the new capabilities OCS offered, and we knew we couldn’t just fire off a message or two and be done with it. A whole communication strategy was required. The first step in our deployment strategy was to survey all the lawyers and staff within the firm. My director and I visited and held numerous meetings in each office. We knew the product and what it offered, so we presented it to the lawyers and staff and asked for feedback as to what they liked and didn’t like, which pieces they thought they’d use and not use, and so forth. Next step, we sat down with our project manager and developed a detailed communications plan that included periodic updates on progress starting with the launch of a pilot program. There was communication prior to the actual launch of the core functionality. In fact, there was so much communication that we actually considered the possibility there might be too many messages going out. And then, just before we officially launched, my director and I took our show on the road again to every office. We gave demos, answered questions, and again asked for input. With that done, we implemented training and deployment. Tell us about your staged approach to the deployment? First and foremost, we wanted to reduce downtime in the firm — avoid it altogether if we could. So we looked at the product and realized it’s broken into two parts that fit our plan perfectly. One part is its core functionality, which includes instant messaging and Live Meeting … and part two is the voice feature. People were already familiar with IM by using Yahoo or 22 Project Management ILTA White Paper other IM programs, so that wasn’t a big risk for us to launch first. Very little training for that was needed. But the voice piece was a little tricky. Where we already had our existing telephony infrastructure in place, we installed our PRIs, our telephone trunks alongside our current telephony infrastructure. We had our gateways installed, so we were really essentially running two separate systems simultaneously. That way, we could run comprehensive tests of the application in a production environment. For a while, we had a pilot group of 50 users, but the response was so positive that we doubled the users to 100. During the test period they actually had two phones at their desks. They had the ability to call out both internally and externally through Office Communicator but couldn’t receive any outside calls — those went through the old telephone system. Once we worked out most of the bugs and felt comfortable that the gateways were performing as expected, we ported our DIDs (Direct Inward Dialing numbers) over the weekend from our existing telephone system to the infrastructure we already had in place, and then on Monday all calls went to the Communicator phones. We then quickly removed the old phones, and it was business as usual without any downtime. It all went pretty smoothly. You mentioned project management as being a significant factor in the success of the project. Could you describe your project management process? And, in particular, how this approach contributed to the team’s success? Project management has been a focus of our director here for the last year and a half. Every service team lead within McInnes is required to attend a project management training seminar. We were familiar with