(Continued from Office 2007 Migration justification)
Office 2007 Migration Program ('M' is migration day, 'M-12' means 12 months before migration)
M-12 Recruit overall program manager to begin coordinating, consulting and informing, including selling in the new features etc. Plan to move in 2 steps - 1: to Office 2007 client applications, but using the 2003 file formats, 2: to native 2007 file formats.
M-10 Recruit developers with migration experience to catalog Office dependent business systems. The number required will depend on the organisational infrastructure, perhaps just 1 or 2 people for all but the largest most complex systems.
M-8 Recruit developers with Office 2007 experience to test every important spreadsheet and system. Estimate they can check and fix approx 300 spreadsheets each (~10 per week) before migration. Changes between test date and migration date must be considered too.
M-6 Provide test Office 2007 machines to each department so they can get a feel for the new software and test some of their own work too. Consider using tools to simplify the step to 2007 such as our Classic menu Tab. Also consider what training materials and on-line resources will be available for users.
M-5 Run a pilot with a challenging department, to spread the load and also to highlight any issues that can inform the main migration program. Also recruit an Outlook migration expert around now to help with the other key Office application, can delay for several months if there are no Outlook add-ins or system interactions to test and update.
M-1 Arrange relevant Office 2007 training for all users. We strongly recommend face to face training. This should be as near to the actual migration of that users machine as possible. Perhaps even during the migration. We suggest a minimum of 1 hour on Office 2007 in general, and a further hour of Excel 2007 specific training and advice for those who use Excel a lot.
M day - or M month. Migrate 10 or 20 machines per day with trainers and devs available for deskside support and coaching to ensure all users can get going quickly. This should be a quiet period for the user so they are not under pressure to deliver key work as they are presented with new tools.
M+1 Devs and trainers still around for support and coaching, and perhaps some enhancement work. But especially for anything missed in initial testing, or breaking changes that have been introduced.
M+2 Migrate to native file format - the name change from .xls to .xlsm will break lots of user written VBA that does not use ActiveWorkbook and ThisWorkbook.
M+3 reassign team - migration should be complete. Perhaps retain key developers in recognition of just how critical spreadsheet have become in your organisation.
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