Introduction
A global pharmaceutical company needed help to migrate 11,000 users from unsupported Windows NT systems to XP and engaged with Halian, who had the experience and technical skills needed to deliver the project successfully. At its peak, this immense project utilised a team of over 60 people.  The early phases of the project were in the UK, but Halian were also engaged in helping users in Spain and other European locations.  

Background
With Windows NT support due to be withdrawn by Microsoft, affecting 11,000 users in a key operational area of the company, senior decision makers had to ensure their systems were upgraded to XP. The upgrade had additional benefits of enabling employees to use the latest Microsoft applications, and provided additional functionality. Although the company was an existing Halian client, their purchasing protocol meant opening the bid for other vendors. Halian bid against other larger companies and won the project due to their expertise in Wintel, proven delivery capability and sensible commercial approach.

Whilst the initial scope of the project was limited to 11,000 users in the UK, Halian were soon involved in supporting additional users throughout Europe including flying a team out to Spain where Halian trained and assisted local staff in deploying XP.

 Solution
This was a critical project for the company and Halian Project Managers worked closely with the in-house Project Manager team to map their activity to the company’s needs. Throughout the project there was a clear requirement to minimise disruption to end users and Halian’s dedicated resourcing team maintained a pipeline of IT specialists throughout the 21-month project. The resourcing team not only find people with the rights skills and cultural fit, but made sure that everybody had been ‘technically vetted’ to guarantee they didn’t fall below the Halian quality bar. 

The project commenced with Halian auditing the client systems where a team moved from desk to desk loading a small utility which ran a thorough system audit. The audit determined the operating system build, installed software applications, system configuration and any peripherals which may have been added on to each system, this information was then automatically loaded on to a central server.

Once the key information such as system type, applications required, printers and other peripherals has been checked and approved, the clients details were then passed to the scheduling team who would contact the client and arrange the appointment for an engineer to perform the migration or where needed replace hardware to meet minimum specifications. A dedicated review team played a crucial part in assessing the information gathered and were then able to coordinate whole work groups to ensure a smooth migration with the minimum of inconvenience. This was a key element to the success of the project as Halian had to ensure that they were able to deploy people very quickly to carry out work in the windows of time allocated by the company.

The scale of the project meant that Halian worked closely with other suppliers to guarantee that the necessary applications and equipment were made available in line with project demand. This also ensured that other parts of the business were progressing with additional aspects such as internal system and infrastructure upgrades.

Halian’s ability to deliver on time and manage major projects was apparent during the 21-month delivery phase of the project where at one time Halian’s team peaked at over 60 staff, not including Project Managers. Halian not only supported the migration, but also helped users who had peripherals that were not officially supported by the client’s IT function, but were necessary for daily use. Post migration support was also provided by Halian to deal with any teething problems from individual users following implementation.

Outcomes and Benefits
Halian took the lead on a major time critical project that minimised the impact on the pharmaceutical company’s internal IT resource and caused minimum disruption to the 11,000 users affected by the necessary upgrade.

Successful delivery of the project meant that the users systems at this global pharmaceutical company were fully supported by Microsoft and all users were operating on standard built systems that could all run the latest versions of applications.

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