You’ve done your due diligence; you compared platforms and features, figured out the licensing, landed the budget and maybe even defined your team, created the project plan and set a deadline.  Nothing left to do but to do it, right?  Maybe.  How would you answer the following questions?

• Do you know why the business is changing platforms (hopefully)? Does everyone else?  (Hint: 'We want to move to the cloud' is not a solid reason)
• In the age of too many tools, have you created your strategy for training and governance around what tools will be used for which tasks?
• Have you taken a good look at current processes to identify gaps and redundancies?
• Do you have a solid strategy to get your Help Desk ready to support employees?

If you don’t like all your responses to those questions, you’re not alone.  Below are some of the more common assumptions that we’ve witnessed trip up the best intended roll outs.

​All too often, we see technology investments go underutilized, regardless of how many efficiencies they bring.

• Migrations are stalled when employees resist, your current tools may be outdated, but employees are resourceful.  They’re accustomed to their work arounds, and in their minds, learning a more efficient way takes too much time.
• Many employees have lived through failed projects before and they are not interested in what you’re selling.
• Shadow IT continues to exist despite the new software having the same features.  Company assets are at risk while they sit on ungoverned third-party apps.

It doesn’t have to be like this.  Below are some recommended solutions to a couple of questions we commonly hear from businesses.

SKYPE FOR BUSINESS - IS GOING AWAY
While Skype for Business is an active and available tool, Microsoft has already transitioned it to the End of Life program: set to conclude on April 1st, 2020.  Microsoft has put a strong emphasis on Microsoft Teams as the default communications app for Office 365.  In fact, to kick off 2019: they successfully migrated 180,000 internal employees and vendors from Skype for Business to Teams.