Designing the agile office across borders
Concluding in April 2019, Mundial Consultants completed the design and implementation of a new agile office environment on behalf of international insurance broker Axis Capital. Located in Atlanta, New York and London a programme of moves and consolidations was undertaken over a period of 18 months including moving into the new Scalpel Building within the city of London as its anchor tenant.
The requirement
As part of a consolidation exercise and relocation, the brief was to create a unified communications experience across competing technologies and across the three different locations.
The client was using a number of different technology platforms across the two continents and three offices and individual user teams creating individual working practices. Additionally with a high dependency on travel within the group, ensuring that a solution was available that worked across boundaries, time zones and user groups was essential.
A solution was to be found to integrate the current Microsoft and Cisco environment alongside the Telephony platform to ensure that each user, each group and each team was supported by a single application without compromise. Additionally, the solution was to set the direction for architectural strategy for the coming 5 year roadmap and integrate with an Audio Visual experience that must work across different hand held devices and room based systems.
The design
In order to design the solution which would involve multiple products, Mundial Consultants, with the support of other consulting partners on the project, hosted a number of workshops in each of the offices. Interviews with senior stakeholders were key to understand the direction of the business, the technology red lines and the success criteria. From this a strong statement of requirements emerged against which the design was created
The design itself involved using Cisco Jabber as a host application with integration to the existing voice platform and then integrating specific elements of Microsoft (Skype for Business) and take the best of all attributes from applications currently in use. Webex and Microsoft teams were discounted due to their infancy and integration capabilities however a path was created in order to allow for migration to this in the future.
Finally, the design integrated with the Audio Visual strategy that had been decided upon within the group to ensure that no matter what the location, application or devices, the solution was intuitive and able to work without impediment and ongoing user support.
The results
Following an exhaustive Proof Of Concept (POC) and on site support and testing, the solution was rolled out simultaneously to all three locations without issue. A strategy of removing phones from desks and moving to a completely wireless supported office was undertaken for the opening of the new London Office, a move which has been adopted in the remaining two locations as part of their consolidation and fit out.
Whilst the product sets were established products, the correct mix and tailoring against use cases was unique and involved the removal of competing products to provide a clear unified approach for the clients teams.
The deployment of this solution was completed over a period of 8 months from design to delivery and has provided not only a unified user experience but also a unified strategic approach to technology within the business without disruption incurred.