By Carla Granger

It was a given that the CIO office would drive Kyndryl’s migration to Microsoft 365. However, the ride would have been much less smooth without input, support and guidance from colleagues across the organization.

The truth is that every department has played a vital role in our Microsoft 365 migration. From New York to Bangalore—and at every Kyndryl office and remote workstation in between—we’ve found that it truly takes a village to effect change at scale.

Long before initiating any sizeable transformation, you must plot a detailed course for your journey. Our CIO office spent the latter half of 2021 and the early part of 2022 mapping and refining a three-phase strategy to steer our platform migration.

Education is key for enablement, so we turned to Microsoft and other trusted partners to help us create a comprehensive instructional strategy. Together, we developed a library of live events, practice exercises and interactive tools to enable employees to learn in a way that fits their style and schedule. 

Our current offerings include Microsoft-hosted training sessions in multiple languages and time zones, on-demand learning based on each employee’s job and skill set, and instructional modules for specific products and services.

We kicked off communications for our transition to Microsoft 365 with an Open Mic livestream hosted by our CEO. He shared news about our new Microsoft partnership and announced that the entire company would be moving to the 365 platform.

Soon after, we began working with our corporate communications team to develop additional videos, blogs, newsletter articles and weekly posts to chronicle Kyndryl’s transition to Microsoft tools. Today, we have three collaboration hubs that form the cornerstone of our ongoing communications.

Not surprisingly, there were missteps on our journey to Microsoft 365. Rather than fixate on what went wrong or who was to blame, we promptly addressed issues and used the experience to guide our way forward.

Bottom line: You’ll make certain decisions along the way that, in hindsight, may not be the best. The key is to help everyone adjust, work toward a better outcome, and learn from the experience.

At some point, you’ll have to measure the performance of any large-scale initiative you undertake. However, our Microsoft 365 transition focuses on qualitative assessments rather than traditional metrics like ROI and cost savings.

In the short term, we’re using the ramp-down of existing applications and the adoption and usage of our new applications as key performance indicators. We’ll eventually use new tooling methods to fully track user sentiment, engagement and productivity, which are critical to enhancing business outcomes.

History is riddled with companies that failed at change—or, at a minimum, failed to do it well.

By embracing your organization’s current challenges and anticipating those that have yet to come, you can recast perceived disruptions as catalysts for progress.

Then, your entire organization will be well-positioned for genuinely transformative change.