Microsoft 365 Enablement
Background
JPL is a federally-funded research and development center managed by Caltech for NASA with more than 6,000 full-time employees and numerous subcontractors and affiliates. In 2018, JPL began long-term planning to retire its Exchange on-premises infrastructure and implement the collaborative capabilities of the Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud. JPL’s ITSD (Information and Technology Solutions Directorate) had contracted Microsoft gold partner ITS Group to support its hybrid cloud architecture and ManTech International Corporation to support its Institutional Computing Environment, but to ensure a seamless and productive migration for its dedicated and diverse population of scientists, engineers, developers, designers, and other experts, ITSD needed additional support for end-user change management to bridge the exposed gaps in technology, process, and culture.
Approach
Seer Strategic Solutions proposed an adoption plan centered around a multi-phased program with rapid content development to create high-fidelity presentations, targeted communications, and a blended learning program – the last encompassing live webinars, self-paced video playlists from LinkedIn Learning, enablement checklists, online articles, and steady-state user guides uploaded to ITSD’s knowledge base. ITSD tasked Seer to design content that would demonstrate the business drivers for JPL and personal benefits for its user community to fully embrace the capabilities of Microsoft’s Modern Workplace, clear messaging around migration tasks and time frames, and best practices for the co-existence period between on-premises and cloud environments. Seer’s assets were required to synthesize NASA’s and JPL’s security protocols such as multi-factor authentication, mail encryption, and in later phases mobile device management required for access, data protection, and preservation of governmental and intellectual properties.
Solution
Seer joined ITSD’s program team to coordinate dynamic efforts over multiple projects that tested device configuration for multiple cloud environments, data migrations from legacy Exchange and Enterprise Vault, and identity management in NASA’s Active Directory applications (NAMS and IdMAX). Seer delivered webinars to ManTech’s Service Desk team and pilot members on the end-user experience and plans to deliver Train the Trainer to JPL organizational trainers, business administration managers, and subject matter experts for basic and advanced use cases. Due to privacy restrictions for usage analytics, Seer, ManTech, and ITSD co-developed pass/fail standards, evaluation surveys, and user forums to capture feedback on the migration experiences and deliver high-level reporting to JPL’s CIO. The program is still in progress with readouts expected at the end of JPL’s fiscal year.