Transition to remote working for Queensland’s Powerlink
- Industry Energy & Utilities
- Capability Enterprise Applications
- Customer Powerlink
Powerlink is a leading Australian provider of high voltage electricity transmission network services, combining innovation with insight to deliver safe, cost effective and reliable solutions. Powerlink also delivers the full spectrum of electricity transmission and associated services, such as renewable energy, asset management, and telecommunications, along with oil, insulation and gas testing.
Opportunity
Powerlink embarked on an IT transformational project to implement a Foundational Mobility infrastructure to introduce digital and technology innovation across the organisation through cloud-based service offerings, and to reduce the reliance of on-premise systems.
With our proven track record in delivering successful projects within Powerlink, we we’re engaged to implement the Foundational Mobility project and once deployed, to set out and deliver Office365 services across the business over a planned and incremental period.
However, prior to the commencement of the Office365 services phased roll out, Australia was impacted by Covid-19, disrupting its workforce’s ability to access and work from its core locations. The impact – if allowed- would have impacted the workforce’s ability to deliver services across Queensland.
In response, Powerlink made the decision to accelerate and upgrade its program of work to meet the immediate needs of its workforce.
Like many organisations around the world responding to Covid-19, Powerlink required rapid deployment of Office 365 Cloud Services and collaboration tools including SharePoint online and Microsoft Teams to enable effective and productive remote working. These solutions would remove the reliance of on-premise system access and storage to enable remote working and would ensure business continuity by enabling its organisation to remain engaged and connected across a dispersed workforce.
Solution
With proven experience with Office 365 deployments, along with a wealth of experience managing large scale and accelerated projects, NRI was engaged to lead the rollout of the solution across the business, paying careful attention to risk factors.
With our end-to-end capability and experience as a Microsoft Partner, we led the project management, change management, business analysis, technical analysis and infrastructure engineering components of the project. It was through further analysis that we we’re able to quickly identify a critical network capacity constraint which would impact the project and user adoption rates, alongside impacting other future cloud services projects in the pipeline. We resolved this by delivering a network capacity uplift whilst simultaneously including the requirements of other in-flight projects, to ensure the required user adoption and experience benchmarks were met.
The rapid delivery and deployment of the project solution, two months earlier than originally planned, allowed for the commencement of planning for migration to Exchange Online earlier than scheduled; bringing forward the projects business benefits whilst allowing the additional cloud services projects to commence earlier.
Outcomes
An accelerated deployment of Office 365 cloud collaboration enabled:
- Powerlink’s workforce to work and collaborate remotely.
- Maintained productivity and engagement in a time of significant disruption and uncertainty.
- Staff and contactors to effectively work from home.
- Significant utilisation of the O365 services, with 500,000 chat messages and logging over four million minutes in video and audio calls within the first two months of deployment.
- Wholesale increase of user adoption rates of cloud-based services across the business.
- Delivery of Powerlink’s first virtual ‘All Hands Town Hall’ by Powerlink’s Chief Executive to its entire workforce.
- Established the foundations of a new way of working and collaborating.
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