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Pillsbury Law Gets Praise For Smooth Windows 10 Migration & Hardware Refresh From Its VIP Lawyers & Staff

With Windows 7 approaching end of support in January 2020, most enterprises are accelerating plans to migrate to Windows 10 in 2018 to take advantage of the new or improved cyber-security capabilities, and avoid an expensive custom support agreement  with Microsoft. However, at this time, fewer organizations than expected have taken the plunge because they dread the Windows-as-a-Service servicing model that requires continuous upgrades and a more agile, Evergreen IT management approach.

Ahead of the game is Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, an international law firm recognized by the Financial Times as one of the Most Innovative Law Firms three years running. Today, I want to share a little sneak peek at our latest customer case study and tell you the story of how Dashworks transformed this dreaded Windows 10 migration experience into an IT Transformation initiative that the 700+ lawyers and their staff could not only get behind, but actively participate in!

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A Law Firm That Gives Their Users The VIP Treatment

Always looking for ways to provide a better user experience for its lawyers, staff, and ultimately customers, the innovative law firm combined its Windows 10 migration project with a hardware refresh initiative. To ensure a fast, low-touch migration project with an outstanding upgrade experience, Windows 10 Program Manager, Tom Rose, and his IT team looked for a tool that could help them:

  1. Deliver a much better user experience. The firm knows that its people are its greatest asset and IT treats them as VIPs. So creating a smooth, consistent, and pleasant user experience was the number one priority, and unnecessary user involvement, such as lengthy interviews to create user profiles, needed to be minimized.
  2. Run multiple projects at the same time. Because the lawyers' devices were due for a hardware refresh, the IT team decided to provide new computers at the same time as the Windows 10 upgrade. Therefore, Tom needed to find an IT Transformation tool that was able to manage multiple projects side-by-side.
  3. Decrease manual labor. The previous migration was very labor-intensive which dragged out the project. For example, when migrating to Windows 7, floorwalkers had to manually record answers to 21 questions — taking 10-30 minutes with each user.
  4. Streamline user communication & enable Self-Service. The team also wanted to encourage their voluntary involvement by leveraging Self-Service and IT automation to effectively manage change at a pace required by firm leadership. 
  5. Centralized Command & Control. Since the firm has office locations all over the world, Tom wanted a central command and control center that allowed everyone on the team to immediately see the exact scope or status of the project without having to compile dozens of spreadsheets. 
  6. Business-as-Usual Capabilities. Since Windows 10 requires frequent updates, the IT team wanted to ensure that the tool they chose would be able to manage future updates using repeatable and scalable processes in a Business-as-Usual manner.

These became the requirements for finding the right IT Transformation Management Platform — and Juriba not only fit the bill, but exceeded expectations!

The Solution: Dashworks

After pitching the solution to executive management and various stakeholders within the company, everyone was enthusiastic and gave the thumbs up. The firm purchased Dashworks, Juriba’s IT Transformation Management platform. Shortly after, Juriba’s consulting team helped configure and modify the platform to accommodate all the project requirements. Contractors were hired and quickly trained to use Dashworks to manage the deployments. The project was up and running within weeks, rather than months — with great success.

Migration started in August and the domestic offices were completed by the second week of December. The team was able to complete 1,331 migrations (1,200 US and 131 international) in 21 migration sites (14 US locations and 7 international offices) within 4.5 months. This equates to about 90% of their estate because the company needed to include some training of a new application, and therefore international deployments were deferred until the beginning of 2018.

Other remarkable facts about this project include:

  • 15,972 Task readiness statuses managed
  • 1,747 project emails sent automatically by Dashworks
  • Reduced the number of in-house applications by 72%!
  • 830 new end-user laptop choices verified and procurement initiated within a couple of weeks

The vast majority of the migration project was completed within just 4.5 months because the heavy lifting of the deployment efforts, including automated email communication, was managed by Dashworks. This immediate win got the team off to a great start. In a recent conversation, Tom Rose said:

We just eliminated a huge amount of manual labor and workload just because we're able to pull together all the information, present it back to the end users, and confirm it versus having to go to each person individually. Something that potentially takes 10 to 30 minutes could be done in less than five. That was a huge win right there.”

The biggest time-savers were the automatic creation of the user profiles which only had to be validated or amended by the end user, the ability to use self-service to select the preferred laptop from a list of pre-approved devices, and automated communication with end users.

In addition to managing the centralized customization and deployment efforts of all their machines in their Nashville offices through Juriba’s central command and control center, Dashworks was instrumental in keeping on top of the project’s progress every single day. Contractors were able to route users through predefined workflows, tracking each and every milestone while leveraging automatically generated drop sheets to customize each device based on the previously collected user requirements.

How Pillsbury Law Will Use The Dashworks Platform Going Forward

While project wrap-up and official user satisfaction surveys are still underway, Tom is pleased: “We received a lot of feedback — especially from some of our biggest critics. So I can safely say that this time there's a lot of people that would say this was a much better implementation effort.”

Going forward, Pillsbury Law is planning on managing their Windows-as-a-Service update deployments and their application management through Dashworks. This platform has truly become the heart and soul of the law firm's new way of managing their end-user IT rollout projects, and the possibilities are endless.

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