CASE STUDY

The client

Tesco is one of the largest grocery and commercial retailers in the world, with 350,000 employees across 12 countries. Founded in 1919 in London, it has in recent years diversified from its core competency of groceries into telecoms, banking, and insurance. 

The challenge

Tesco was coming up against the limits of its collaboration tooling and was struggling with low employee engagement and significant barriers to collaboration.

Employees were using a combination of five different tools to conduct virtual meetings, many of which were audio only. At the same time, the operational costs for all these different tools were too high to be sustainable. 

In order to save money and improve global collaboration, the company decided to consolidate their tooling and migrate to a single platform for video conferencing: Cisco Webex. As existing technology contracts were coming to an end, this meant migrating 7,000 employees across 12 countries in the space of only three months. 

The rapid migration would also need to be executed with minimum business disruption. The retail industry is a high pressure environment with very thin margins and constant cost-cutting. There was no room for a slow-down in business activities while the migration was carried out.

Tesco engaged Future Worx to create and execute a plan to migrate to Webex. 

Traditionally, Tesco had executed technology migrations in a tool-centric, waterfall fashion that focused mainly on implementing on budget and on time, without deeply considering the needs of the users and how they can be supported. 

The Future Worx team helped them understand that this would likely end in failure: the employees were so used to audio dial-in that without support to adopt the new tools Tesco would struggle to get the most out of their technology investment. 

We developed a flexible, user-first plan that would help them not only to migrate to the new platform but to bring their people on the journey with them.

This incorporated several key success factors -

The solution

  • Firstly, we held a deep-dive workshop to get to know the business, identify employee needs and determine key business objectives. We were careful to make no assumptions about the organisation or its people so as to deliver a fresh, bespoke plan that would genuinely meet the needs of the business.

  • Secondly, we included the leadership, ensuring they were involved from the beginning and that we had their support and backing for the transformation. High-level buy-in is critical to support large migrations.

  • Thirdly, we ensured that we focused on the user throughout. We paid particular attention to the user experience, ensuring that it is as smooth as possible and testing it thoroughly on the same devices that employees would be using.

With the plan in place, we moved into the execution phase, which consisted of two major parts -

With the plan in place, we moved into the execution phase, which consisted of two major parts. Firstly, we engaged in a substantial pre-launch communications campaign to ensure that everyone was ready for the transition, knew where they could go for support and to create excitement about how the migration would help people to do their jobs better.

Using simple, friendly language we repeatedly reminded employees why the transition was needed and all the ways in which it would help them. A set of best-practice user guides were developed to help walk them through the new tooling. Finally, we made them aware that if they ran into problems, they could contact the Genius Desk: our bespoke, white-glove support service that offers one-on-one learning assistance.

Secondly, the launch itself was managed in several waves of 500 users in order to better manage the Genius Desk workload. We made sure everyone knew when it was their turn to migrate, directing them towards resources and training to make it as easy as possible to get started with the new tool. 

Via the Genius Desk, we were able to keep our finger on the pulse of the migration, gathering feedback from all the new users in each wave. We were able to quickly identify any user experience issues and rapidly course correct for the next wave of adoption.

The business
outcome

The Tesco team described the Cisco Webex migration as the smoothest IT change that they had ever experienced. The whole migration was completed within three months, with minimal business disruption.

We successfully helped 7,000 employees to not only migrate from audio-only to video conferencing but supported them to confidently get the most out of the new tools. 

This represented a massive leap forward for Tesco’s communication capabilities, enabling employees to collaborate more effectively as well as work remotely. It was delivered on time and on budget, which meant a major cost saving for Tesco by consolidating several tools into one.