Multinational corporations often plan changes that will affect the whole organization.
Usually, you’ll set up a team of technical experts that will design and build the solution, but often it is unrealistic to believe that these few people will be able to implement the changes worldwide. Usually, migrating the organization from the old way of doing things to the new one, is a joint effort of a core team and on site resources.
If the number of countries is small, the core team might decide to travel and do the migrations on site with the support of the local IT or the heads of the local IT can be part of the core team and prepare their part of the rollout. This option means that each head of local IT needs to learn and discuss with each of the other project streams what exactly will happen in their country and who will do what and when.
If there are more than five locally distributed IT organizations, it is convenient to set up a subproject that is in charge of making sure that relevant information flows in both directions global <-> local and triggering, tracking the local activities and coordinate the solution of issues.
This project stream is often called regional rollout and it would be the Single Point of Contact for the core team and the local IT.
In plain English, the regional rollout subproject manager acts as the minister of foreign affairs to the project. She is part of the core team (government), and she needs to interact with all other team members. But she also needs to be permanently in touch with the ambassadors that are spread worldwide because they have a better insight of the local reality. And also, these diplomats need to be informed about the central project’s evolution and progress to plan their activities.
From the Regional Rollout point of view, the focus needs to be on the following aspects:
1. Assessment or exploration of the local reality to validate the designed solution
Some countries have legal or organizational constraints, and therefore, they are not working with the same standards as the rest of the company.
Eventually, the designed solution or the migration activities might not be implementable in all countries due to the mentioned constraints.
It is the role of the regional rollout to facilitate that the information flows in both directions, to make sure that the designers know about all possible constraints and that the critical countries can confirm that the final solution and the migration process is executable.
2. Agree on migration processes
The fact that often it won’t be possible to migrate the whole organization at the same time means that the rollout will be repeated more than once, and it will be involving different local IT colleagues. Therefore, it is justified to invest time in having all the steps and the processes documented in detail and aligned with all stakeholders.
The focus of the regional rollout stream is to align and describe all the work that the local IT organizations will perform.
Usually, the output is a sequence of actions that we’ll schedule around the migration date, e.g., task “x” needs to end at least one month before migration, activity “y” ten days after, etc.)
3. Agree on communication plan
In some projects, it is necessary to contact the final users to inform them about the changes ahead or train them in the new tools or environment.
Usually, there is a project stream set up for that, but this subproject needs to know what to communicate, when and to whom exactly.
During the plan and building stage, the communication team will decide on the announcements or training they’ll prepare for the users. They will also define a schedule that describes how many days before or after the migration these pieces of information or activities will be sent out in each case.
As not all countries migrate on the same day, the regional rollout Team needs to keep the Communication Team updated on the latest plan so that they can send out the scheduled communication material on time and to the right users.
4. Agree on global migration plan
As mentioned already above, the rollout processes will be repeated as often as necessary until the whole organization is migrated to the new environment. Therefore, there is a need to decide on the order and the pace of the migrations. Usually, it will start sequentially, one country after the other, and at some point, the teams have enough experience to migrate more than one country at the same time.
5. Trigger and monitor each rollout
Putting together the defined processes and the global migration plan, we’ll find ourselves with a project portfolio of “n” almost identical projects that we have to execute.
The role of the regional rollout work stream is not to implement the rollouts but to trigger and provide the necessary support to get it done on time and with the expected quality. Finally, this work stream will monitor and regularly report the progress to the project board.
In general, not all projects need the same degree of involvement of the regional rollout workstream. It is advisable to invest some time in finding out what the best and leanest setup makes sense in each particular case.