This article was originally first published at the ITSM Review.
Your business has been relying on Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 for some time now, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that you will soon need to have things ready for a transition to Microsoft’s latest offering — Windows 10.
With Windows 10 comes a set of changes that your IT team may not yet be entirely familiar with, such as new security configurations, how to handle application management or creating policies around Windows 10 branching.
As your enterprise prepares to migrate to Windows 10, you have thousands of users to consider. This is no time to be understaffed, as there will be many moving parts for you to keep track of and under control. This naturally raises the question among IT professionals. How are we to staff our Windows 10 migration team correctly?
Whether you are planning on having a third party help you as a service integrator, considering a hybrid approach, or thinking about running it internally or via your Business As Usual (BAU) teams, it is time to start thinking about what roles to fill for a successful migration. Of course, when you are heading up the migration effort for tens of thousands of employees and a similar amount of devices including desktop and mobile assets, you’ll need to choose the best migration command and control tools to assist the new hires for the team and help them work more efficiently.
This is a project that calls for team stability, and you would be best served by recruiting resource (internal or external) that will be with you for the long haul. Preparation time for a Windows 10 migration in an enterprise could take as long as 9 to 12 months, according to a recent article at Computerworld. During that period, your new or contracted staff will be collecting pertinent information, making images, testing them to see how well they deploy before moving on to readiness tracking/scheduling migration.
You’ll want to define the roles that must be included in the migration team as well as which ones are optional, so you can deploy your resources as efficiently as possible. One of the more important tasks is to determine which skill sets will be required in your team.
A number of roles must be staffed for your successful Windows 10 migration. While every enterprise is different and will naturally have unique circumstances and requirements for staffing, the following is a list of roles that you should most likely need to include to ensure that the migration will go as smoothly as possible.
Your organization’s definition of “optional” may be very different from similar businesses in the industry. However, it is good to keep in mind the roles that are of lower priority so you can deploy the most needed human resources first. Circumstances may change where what was once optional is now needed to keep the project on track.
For example, you may find that you can do without communications experts if you find that end users can do just fine with the available literature and training materials. Likewise, user acceptance testers who check on how Windows 10 works with the rank and file may be optional, depending on the knowledge and experience of the majority of your end users.
While organizing a list of various roles that you’ll need to staff before the Windows 10 migration is necessary, it is also worth noting the skill sets required to make your project a success.
Critical skill sets needed for the migration include asset management and role-based management, noted a recent report from BetaNews. Experience in centralized system packaging is also needed (making an image or through a bundled deployment).
You’ll also want someone on your team who is skilled at managing reboots and ensuring that all implementations are kept track of during installation.
It is not always going to be easy to fill in holes in your workforce, especially when talent is in high demand and your competitors are in the same position regarding staffing up for a Windows 10 migration. Keep in mind that your road to Windows 10 will be smoother when your enterprise takes advantage of the Juriba’s IT project management tool Dashworks.