‘IT Stories from the Road’ is a series of first-person stories told by IT professionals. If you’d like to share a story, email us at dexhub@nexthink.com!
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Having worked in IT for close to a decade, I’ve never encountered a transformation project that didn’t offer a little anxiety and pressure. Something can always go wrong, even when you plan ahead.
But that all changed last year.
I experienced my first, stress-free transformation project and I want to detail how that came to be.
I’ve been using Nexthink’s DEX Management Tool for a few years now, and it’s helped my team and I greatly with our work.
9,000 Users & NO INCIDENTS?!
Last year my team and I were under a lot of pressure to provide a great service to one of our biggest customers.
They were quickly approaching their end of support for Internet Explorer (IE) and needed to transition to Edge, and they had 9,000 users and several legacy applications that still require IE.
A single disruption, even to a few users, might set the company back millions of dollars.
In the past, it was standard for this customer to overcommunicate with users whenever it was time to sunset a particular tool or service. They’d send several emails and hold training webinars, but still, their help desk would flood with tickets and complaints after the change was implemented.
I used to think overcommunicating in IT was a smart safeguard, but after using Nexthink I realized you can be much more targeted and economical with your communications.
Almost immediately after implementing the switch, we used the tool to identify an issue with some devices that didn’t set up the Edge policies correctly, so we took proactive action with built-in automations to resolve this issue.
Rather than waiting for tickets to come into the help desk (by then it would be far too late), we were able to pin-point in real-time, the exact users who needed extra help. We then used Nexthink’s direct-to-device engagement tool to communicate with and influence those users to access Edge.
And If We Didn’t Have a DEX Tool? H-E-L-P!
If we didn’t have this DEX tool, in the past we’d have to go to the application owner and wait for that person to send back a list of ‘all users’ who have access to those legacy applications, and it would probably take us a few days of painstaking work trying to reconfigure users and train them on how to make the switch.
Rather than going through all that back and forth, we were able to change the computing habits of 9,000 people in just a few clicks, and the entire user community was able to move their bookmarks and user data from the legacy browser to the new browser.
If only moving into a new apartment or house was that easy!
My Best Practices for Similar Projects
There are a few things I took away from this project that I think anybody in End-User Computing might benefit from:
- You can’t beat direct-to-device messaging and engagement! Emails and online surveys rarely receive the type of engagement IT hopes for, but a smart pop-up and targeting tool eliminates so many problems down the line.
- A transformation project that isn’t anchored to real-time application usage data is like a ticking time bomb (IT needs to know how users are engaging with their tools; a software headcount showing installations isn’t enough!).
- A true DEX solutions tool should enable IT to immediately tie up the loose ends of any transformation project that deviates from the original plan, and in most cases, it should help them to proactively eliminate problems from occurring again. The best fix is the one that permanently removes a bug or error.
If you find yourself repeating the same investigations and fixes over and over with your transformation projects, then you likely have a big opportunity to automate and remove that work.
You just need the right tool.
