4-page Case Study - Posted 11/4/2009
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Engineering firm helps drive employee productivity and IT efficiency with Windows 7
MMM Group is a planning, engineering, geomatics and project management firm that provides professional consulting services for sustainable community, building, transportation and infrastructure development throughout Canada and the rest of the world. To maintain a leading edge in a very competitive engineering services market, the company focuses on providing employees with the tools they need to work effectively. As a way of enhancing productivity, the company wanted to provide staff with easier access to drawings, contracts and other documents. MMM Group also wanted to reduce the amount of time the IT department spent on administrative tasks. To tackle this challenge, the company developed a strategy for re-vamping its technology environment, which included adoption of the Microsoft® Windows® 7 operating system. Staff is using Windows 7 to quickly access information, while the IT department is leveraging new time-saving features that will allow them to focus on more strategic goals.
Situation
At MMM Group, senior engineers work closely with new graduates, combining experience with the latest design practices to provide planning, engineering and geomatics services to government and private sector clients. This focus on client success has contributed to the company’s rapid growth: Over the past five years, the multidisciplinary engineering firm has grown from a 500-person company to a firm with over 1700 employees.
MMM reinvests in its business each year to ensure that it has the people, tools and techniques to stay on the leading edge of a very competitive industry. According to Mark Bryant, Chief Information Officer for MMM Group, this is why technology has become embedded in the firm’s culture.
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With Windows 7, Microsoft has consolidated a number of offline management tools into a single tool called Deployment Image Servicing and Management. This will be a big time-saver for my team. |
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Mark Bryant, Chief Information Officer, MMM Group |
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“Technology investments are a big priority for one reason: technology innovation begets business innovation. We need to make sure we evolve using the right products or we’re not going to beat our competitors to the punch,” says Bryant. “From an IT perspective, this means we have to create a solid technology environment -- one that will provide our employees with quick, easy access to information at anytime, from anywhere.”
But with teams distributed across the country, ensuring people have quick access to the right files at the right time is no easy task. For example, if someone is working on a project in the Vancouver area, they may have to draw from talent based in several other offices across the country. This means MMM Group has a number of large files moving across their network at any given time, which can hinder workflow and increase security risks. It can also make it difficult for staff to find the latest version of a document or drawing, which could be in a number of locations – either buried in a folder, on a colleague’s computer, or sitting in an email.
The IT team also wanted to reduce the amount of time spent on administrative tasks and end-user support. System complexity was taking away from the time they needed to focus on aligning their technology investments to MMM Group’s business goals.
Solution
When determining a strategy to overcome these challenges, Bryant and his team knew they had to get it right the first time. As a result, they decided to re-build the company’s technology environment from the ground up. On the back-end, they chose to deploy Microsoft SharePoint® Server 2007, a solution designed to enhance employee efficiency through document sharing and other collaboration tools.
Another element of the strategy involved making information more accessible to users over the desktop. MMM Group decided to leverage an operating system with an intuitive user interface that would be easy for his team to quickly deploy across the company. To minimize the amount of time required to train employees on a new system, MMM group moved directly from Microsoft Windows XP to Microsoft Windows 7, followed by a server upgrade from Windows Server® 2003 to Windows Server 2008 on key infrastructure, and future plans to move to Windows Server 2008 R2 as a final step. From there, the goal is to continue investing in new productivity tools, such as Microsoft Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010.
“With a solid technology environment in place, we can reap the benefits of a new operating system,” says Michael Grieco, Manager IT at MMM Group. “With Windows 7, Microsoft has consolidated a number of offline management tools into a single tool called Deployment Image Servicing and Management. We are excited about having the opportunity to take advantage of things like the deployment tools, because it will be a big time-saver for the team.”
Other Windows 7 features such as Dynamic Driver Provisioning and multi-language support will also help the MMM Group IT staff significantly reduce the effort involved in maintaining a single image for their entire IT infrastructure.
Windows Server 2008 R2 has many features that are designed specifically to work with computers running Windows 7. Because MMM Group will be running the new operating system on top of the upgraded server, the IT department will be able to take advantage of features like BranchCache and DirectAccess, which gives mobile users access to corporate networks collapsing and simplifying some existing technology infrastructure, while reducing maintenance on same.
Windows 7 will also make it easier for the MMM team to ensure data is secure, even when employees are on the go. IT administrators can set a policy that requires users to apply data protection to removable drives before being able to write to them. The BitLocker Drive Encryption feature helps protect sensitive data from unauthorized users who come into possession of lost or stolen computers.
Benefits
Easier Access to Information
With easier access to information, the firm’s engineers can focus on what they do best: providing clients with customized services – on budget and on time. Not using this – but we are planning on leveraging the enhanced search capabilities within Windows 7 as an enabler.
“The BranchCache feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 will provide another major advantage in terms of time savings. Sometimes we have four or five people acquiring the same large file. Now only one person located per office will have to download the file. For the next few people, branch cache enables the file to be acquired locally,” says Palak Patel - Enterprise Architect at MMM Group. “This can save us hours in terms of download time, and reduce our dependency on the network.”
Automated Business Processes
The new operating system working with SharePoint and its inherent workflow automation capability will also help the firm automate business processes that are traditionally very time-consuming, such as hiring. “By automating the employee on-boarding process, we can reduce the time required to get a new staff member up and running in half. This involves putting in the right platforms, and Windows 7 is a key part of that strategy,” says Bryant.
The ability to embed new hires into the operations paradigm very quickly has put MMM Group in a stronger competitive position.
Reduced Burden on IT
With the Windows 7 deployment tools, MMM Group will be able to create a standard image based on the feedback from their pilot group. Windows 7 capabilities such as Dynamic Driver Provisioning and data hard-linking enable the IT staff to automate reduce the labour needed to build or re-image a desktop PC. MMM Group anticipates that this will reduce the amount of time required to manage imagery by 30-40%. The single PC image is also helping to reduce desktop complexity, resulting in improvements in PC user experience. By streamlining this process, and leveraging standard imaging practices MMM Group will be able to cut down on costs associated with image deployment and long-term end user workstation maintenance, while improving service delivery
With additional security features in place, such as BitLocker Drive Encryption, the IT team can easily ensure that sensitive client material does not fall into the wrong hands. At the end of the day, Bryant’s IT team will be able to focus on more sophisticated tasks associated with managing their IT infrastructure.
MMM Group is building a technology environment that fully supports the needs of its information workers. With Windows 7 in place, the IT team at MMM Group will be able to focus on helping the company continue delivering its vision: maintaining a competitive edge by providing employees with the very best technology tools.
