👏🏽 🤲🏿 🧖 How we transferred to SAAS a distributed team of several hundred people 👩🏾‍🤝‍👩🏼 ⚰️ 👩🏿‍🚒

Collaboration is a sore spot for traditional office tools. When ten people work on a file at the same time, more time and effort is no longer spent on editing, but on searching for changes and their authors. This is complicated by many applications that are not always compatible. One way to solve this problem is to upgrade to cloud-based office suites. There are not so many of them, and we will tell you how we overcame the conservatism of Forex Club employees and were able to transfer to G Suite a distributed company with hundreds of offices in just a couple of months.

Why did you decide to go

Forex Club is usually remembered in the context of online trading at exchange rates. But this company works with several types of currency instruments in different countries of the world. Because of this, she has a very complex IT infrastructure with her own platform for customers.

At the time of our acquaintance, the back-office of the company used several different platforms and applications. The main working tool for most of the employees was the Microsoft office suite and mail on Zimbra. Above all this, an add-on from additional storages, backups, antivirus, numerous connectors and integrations, as well as Microsoft and Zimbra license management with periodic audits.

Forex Club IT department was unprofitable to support this system. Sophisticated infrastructure required the rental of a large number of servers, DRP plans in case of disconnection of these servers or a failure of the Internet connection, backups. To ensure trouble-free operation, a special department of administrators was formed over time, which still had the task of license audits.

Due to the abundance of different programs, ordinary Forex Club employees also had problems. Without means of tracking versions of documents, it was difficult to find the author of some corrections and the final version of the text or table.

In an effort to reduce maintenance costs, Forex Club was looking for a way to solve the same problems easier. This is where our interaction began.

Search for an alternative

To implement full-fledged collaboration, it was necessary to change the approach itself - to move from local storage to the cloud. Forex Club began looking for a common cloud solution for all office applications. There were two candidates: Office 365 and G Suite.

Office 365 was a priority since many Forex Club licenses were purchased from Microsoft. But Office 365 only migrates some of the features of the office suite to the cloud. Users still need to download the application from their personal account and use it to work with documents according to the old scheme: send and re-save copies with version indexes.

Google Cloud G Suite has more collaboration features, and it's cheaper. In the case of Microsoft products, I would have to use the Enterprise Agreement, and this is a completely different level of expenses (even taking into account the purchased software). And the implementation of G Suite with our help went through the Google program, which compensated large customers for the cost of switching to the company's services.

It was planned to transfer to G Suite most of the services that employees use:

Calendar and email (Gmail and Google Calendar);
Notes (Google Keep);
Chat and online conferences (Chat, Hangouts);
Office suite and survey generator (Google Docs, Google Forms);
Shared Storage (GDrive).

Overcome the negative

The implementation of any tool, even the most convenient one, always faces the negative of end users. The main reason is conservatism, since people do not want to change anything and get used to new approaches in work. The situation was complicated by the specific perception of the presence on the web as just going to sites (but not working on these sites), common among non-IT employees. They simply did not understand how to work with this.

On the Forex CLub side, Dmitry Ostroverkhov was responsible for the implementation of the project. He controlled the stages of implementation, collected user reviews and prioritized tasks. Joint training, employee surveys, explanations of the rules of the company made it easier for us to start.

The main objective of Softline in this project was to train users and system administrators and technical support in the first stage. We explained how the product should work through a series of trainings. In total, we conducted 15 trainings of 4 hours each. The first - before the pilot - for system administrators who set the stage for transformation. And the subsequent ones are already for ordinary employees.

As part of the main training program, we emphasized the advantages that compensated the end users for the difficulty of getting used to the new tool. And at the end of each training, employees could come up with their questions, which removed the pitfalls at the beginning of the work.

Although Forex Club holds training seminars for its own clients, the company could not start training on G Suite on its own due to the lack of teachers with the necessary competencies. To evaluate the impact of our trainings, Forex Club conducted surveys of students before the training and some time after it. The first survey showed mostly negative perceptions of future changes. The second - on the contrary, the rise of positive. People began to realize that this applied to their work.

Pilot office

The project began at the end of 2017, when ten system administrators switched to G Suite. These people had to become pioneers who identified the pros and cons of the solution and paved the way for transformation. We took into account their feedback and recommendations, and in January 2018 we selected a medium-sized branch with a local system administrator for the first test transition of non-IT employees.

The transition was made simultaneously. Yes, it’s hard for people to switch to new tools, so if you can choose between a cloud solution and a desktop application, users will tend to a more familiar desktop and slow down global update plans. So, upon completion of the training for the pilot office, we quickly transferred everyone to the G Suite. The first couple of weeks, there was still some resistance; a local system administrator dealt with it, who explained and showed all the difficult moments.

Following the pilot office, we completely transferred the entire Forex Club IT department to the G Suite.

We change a branch network

After analyzing the experience of the pilot project, we, together with the Forex Club IT department, developed a transition plan for the rest of the company. It was originally planned that the process will take place in two stages. At the first stage, we wanted to train only the most Forex Club employees who are most loyal to the product, who will promote the project in their offices - they will help colleagues move to a new platform in the second stage. To select the “evangelists” in the company, we conducted a survey, the results of which exceeded all expectations: about half of the entire Forex Club responded. Then we decided not to stretch the process and missed the stage of “implementation through employees”.

As in the pilot project, first the head offices migrated, where there is a local system administrator - he helped to cope with the arising difficulties. In each office, the transition to new tools was preceded by training. Training had to be planned according to a flexible schedule, which took into account different time zones and work schedules. For example, for offices in Kazakhstan and China, the trainings had to start at 5 am Moscow time (by the way, G Suite works fine in China, no matter what).

Following the head offices, a branch network has switched to G Suite - about 100 points. The peculiarity of the last stage of the project was that in these branches there are mainly salespeople who work a lot with spreadsheets. For them, we conducted training for two weeks to help transfer data.

At the same time, our specialists worked behind the scenes of support for Forex Club itself, since immediately after the transition to G Suite, the number of calls to technical support increased as expected. The peak of applications fell on the transition of the branch network, but gradually the number of requests began to decrease. Applications for office products and e-mail, management of software licenses, work with servers and network equipment, as well as backup communication channels were especially reduced. That is, the implementation has reduced the load on the first line of support and back-office.

In total, the transfer of offices took about two months: in February 2018, work was completed in the head offices, and in March - throughout the branch network.

Underwater rocks

A major problem was the speed of email migration. It took 1 second to transfer one email from Zimbra to Gmail using IMAP Sync. About 700 employees work in hundreds of Forex Club offices, and each of them has thousands of letters (in total, they serve more than 2 million customers). So to speed up the migration, we used the G Suite Migration Tool, with it the process of copying letters went faster.

Data from calendars and tasks was not required to be transferred. Although there were some solutions in the old infrastructure, they were not fully used by employees. For example, corporate calendars were implemented in the form of a portal on Bitrix, which is inconvenient, therefore, employees had their own tools, and the employees engaged in data transfer independently.

Also, users were transferred to transfer operational documents (we are only talking about data on current work - a different solution is used for the company's knowledge base). No questions have arisen here. It was just that at some point an administrative line was drawn - the responsibility for the information stored locally passed to the users themselves, while the IT department already monitored the safety and security of data on Google Drive.

Unfortunately, not all workflows managed to pick up analogues in G Suite. For example, the general mailboxes that Forex Club employees are used to using in Gmail do not have filters, so finding a specific letter is difficult. The same difficulty was with SSO authorization in Google Chat, but this problem was solved through a request in support of Google.

The main problems for users were related to the fact that Google services do not yet have part of the competitors' functions, for example, the same Skype or Office 365. Hangouts only allows you to make calls, Google Chat lacks quoting, and Google Sheets supports Microsoft Excel macros.

In addition, Microsoft and Google Cloud products have different approaches to table editing tools. Word files that contain spreadsheets sometimes open with incorrect formatting in Google Docs.

As we get used to the new infrastructure, some of the difficulties were solved through alternative approaches. For example, instead of macros, spreadsheets use scripts that seem even more convenient for Forex Club employees. Failed to find an analogue only for the financial department of Forex Club, which deals with 1C reports (with scripts, complex formatting). Therefore, he switched to Google Sheet only in terms of collaboration. For other documents, the office suite (Excel) is still used.

In total, Forex Club left about 10% of Microsoft Office licenses. For such projects, this is normal practice: fewer employees use the advanced features of office suites, so the rest can easily accept a replacement.

It should be noted that no large-scale transformations were carried out on the rest of the infrastructure. Forex Club did not abandon Jira and Confluence, although it introduced Google Keep for operational tasks. To integrate Jira and Confluence with the G Suite, we have deployed plugins that allow you to quickly transfer data. The monitoring system has been preserved, as well as many additional tools: Trello, Teamup, CRM, Metrics, AWS, etc. Naturally, the system administrators remained in the branches.

Chromebook experiment

In search of a way to cut costs, Forex Club intended to transfer everyone to Chromebook-based mobile workstations. The device itself is extremely cheap, and using cloud services on it, you can quickly deploy a workstation.

We tested mobile jobs on a small group of 25 users in the sales department. The employees of this department did not have tasks that would prevent work only through the web, so for them this migration should have passed unnoticed. But according to the test results, it turned out that the hardware of an inexpensive Chromebook does not work correctly for all Forex Club enterprise applications. And more expensive models that fit the technical parameters turned out to be commensurate in value with classic laptops based on Windows. As a result, they decided to abandon the project.

What has changed with the advent of G Suite

Despite all the prejudices and distrust, already 3 months after the training in the polls, 80% of the staff said that G Suite really made it easier for them to work with documents. After the transition, the mobility of employees who began to work more with wearable devices increased:

Statistics on the use of mobile devices according to Forex Club

Google Forms gained great popularity. Inside departments, they allow you to quickly conduct surveys for which you previously had to use mail, collecting the results manually. The most questions and complaints were caused by the transition to Google Chat and Hangouts Meet, as they generally have fewer functions, but their use allowed to abandon many messengers within the company.

The project results were formulated by Dmitry Ostroverkhov, with whom we worked: “The project reduced the costs of the Forex Club on IT infrastructure and simplified its support. A whole layer of process maintenance tasks has disappeared, as these issues are being addressed by Google. Now all services can be configured remotely, they are supported by a couple of Google administrators, and the IT department has freed up time and resources for other things. ”

How we transferred to SAAS a distributed team of several hundred people