So we recently won a really great project… 3600 users on Office 365 to G Suite, the IT team of the customer were very convinced and willing to change, however the time frame we got for the whole project was somehow ‘tight’…

I’ve done pre-sales part on this project, and we originally started with them on a POC where two of their IT members migrated their data and created forwarding from Office 365 to G Suite. Then the testing circle slowly expanded to include their CIO.

Once we got the IT’s satisfaction, the CIO submitted his report to the board. They needed one week to make the decision and we won the deal.

Turns out that after sitting with CIO after the approval that we have only 75 days 60 days to finish the whole project. Their subscription will expire and they will not renew, and they already sent the cancellation email to Microsoft!

So we conducted the technical kick-off meeting, with the infrastructure and support teams… both teams actually will have a hard time coming to them, with the support team being on the front lines facing the hell of end users…

What is interesting about this project for me is the time really… I’ll be working with the infrastructure team to prepare all the dual delivery and fixing every single problem in a very squeezed time, in normal situations, these activities need a schedule and a process that will ensure that every step we take is coming after a successful previous activity where no errors, or performance effects to end users occurred. In our situation, we will have to squeeze everything and do all these required activities in about quarter the usual time we need!

It is a challenge, and at the same time a very dangerous situation, because of the time issue, we will not be having much space to test and validate the setup before we apply it to production, we will have to rely on the POC results and expectations to do the whole production scenario setup, normally we will go through each stage, and do a test and discovery configuration where we will know what problems to expect, and how much time we are expected to take and need, then we will make sure the setup is not going to disrupt the current workflow… but for this case, we have to do the changes, and monitor the live data and realtime logs and be ready to rollback or deal with any surprise…

We have to deliver our results on the time no matter what, because at a specific point of time during this project the support team will start their work, and they are assuming that we will have results to give them once they start. If we miss our date the whole project will fail and once the expiration date arrive the data on Office 365 will be lost forever if we were not finished from the data migration. So if we get a problem with the planned setup and configuration we have no option but to improvise and fix that problem with whatever way we have to keep our work going and give the support team the expected results (which is list of accounts who are ready to use G Suite with their old data fully migrated)…

So this is a big challenge, and I find myself really willing to take it and succeed in it, this is a great opportunity to live under pressure and test myself and to apply all what I have learned so far about priority, tasks, time, and resources management!

I will follow up this post with daily updates about problems, scenarios, configuration workarounds and situations we encounter and what I did to fulfill the requirements and complete the tasks!


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