Resigility’s Support for our Client’s Operations During the Covid-19 Response
Using Our Own Telework Experience to Help Our Clients Succeed in an Age of New Challenges and Pressures
As the world responds to a pandemic that is having an unprecedented impact on daily life, many businesses are continuing operations, as best they can, from their normal place of business. Here at Resigility, working from home is a near-constant state of affairs, even before the pandemic. Much of our small team resides in the Greater DC area, while our principal client, a Chief Information Officer of a large organization, is located in Atlanta, GA. Each week, one or two team members typically is on-site in Atlanta for two or three days. The remainder of the team uses a variety of digital tools designed to make teleworking easier: from virtual team meetings and teleconferences to file sharing and storage tools. This experience made us especially capable of aiding and supporting our client, who, like many other organizations, has needed more employees to telework than ever before. Our client’s challenge of shifting several thousand employees to telework has led Resigility to provide a new level of support to our client and the organization.
A New Customer Support Model
The Chief Information Officer of any organization needs to ensure the technology backbone of the company is continuously operating and providing employees with the technology support they need. When an entire organization must transition to telework, the CIO must provide more, newer, and sometimes innovative support models for their customers, the employees.
With the implementation of the telework environment, our client was faced with two big challenges:
- A population of employees now require laptops because they have traditionally never worked from home, completing all their work on desktops available in the office; and
- Our client needed to deliver these laptops to new or existing employees while using methods that maintained social distancing.
Ultimately, the client needed to develop a new customer support model that allowed IT technicians to deliver new equipment to employees who were following self-isolation guidance by staying in their homes. To solve this problem Resigility and our client proposed a drive-through model where employees would receive the equipment they required without ever leaving their car. Resigility helped develop and refine this model.
To effectively support the new needs of the workforce, we helped our client develop a brand-new operating model and way of working. This included a new way of providing customer support to those working remotely as well as on-site customer service to the essential workers who were required to complete their business on-site. With an unfamiliar set of issues and problems that customers might be experiencing, the response team also required a reassessed way to prioritize and deliver services. Our team supported the creation of a digital form that would automate workflow, communication materials to help employees understand the new support model, and instructional materials for technicians to guide their behavior, including the use of protective equipment and proper social distancing. There was very little time between the development of these new processes and procedures and actual implementation, requiring the work to be completed at a very quick pace without sacrificing accuracy.
Asset Management
A large portion of our client’s workforce has never needed to work from home, and thus has never required a company-issued laptop. Our team helped diagnose this group of employees to see where laptop needs might arise or where additional advice and support for teleworking might be needed.
Our client’s employees are also scattered throughout the Atlanta metropolitan area, including some remote locations where the employees do not have consistent access to a strong internet connection. These employees required new tools that would allow them to have strong, secure connections, allowing them to remote connect to the data and tools available on the client’s internal network. To support our client in addressing these needs, we helped diagnose the potential needs and developed a strategy for distributing mobile WiFi devices that would provide these employees the access they required.
Support for New Teleworking Operating Model
Given the limited experience of most employees working from home, many had little knowledge of all the methods that would allow them to easily access the organization’s network or the tools required to get their job done. Our team put together how-to guides for the tools we had grown accustomed to using as a part of our regular course of duties, and re-designed internal webpages to better suit the needs of a teleworking workforce.
Recognizing the existing software widely distributed within the client’s workforce would be insufficient for a group that would be teleworking for significant periods, we also helped the client understand additional virtual collaboration tools available to them. For example, Microsoft Teams had been rolled out in a limited manner through the organization, and we suggested that our client broaden its use as a collaboration space and workspace hub for different essential teams across the organization.
With a significant portion of the organization’s workforce not venturing into the office and a large number of employees using unfamiliar software tools and a portion receiving new hardware assets, our client new paradigm for customer service provision proved essential.
Situational Awareness
The large number of employees working from 1000’s locations required additional bandwidth and resources for the customer. Any time new resources are brought on-line, new and unexpected issues can arise. In order to help keep leadership abreast of all the resources it’s customers were using, Resigility helped create new monitoring requirements for our client’s organization. To help close this gap, Resigility has been distilling various metrics and support data from across the agency into Situation Reports for the CIO and the senior leadership of the entire organization. These reports are comprised of dashboards that provide a summary of the multiple systems and services necessary for the organization to operate remotely effectively and are provided three times per day.
Preparing for the Unexpected
Like the rest of the world, our team at Resigility was surprised by the impact Covid-19 has had on society writ large, but we’ve been fortunate that our own experience had allowed us to seamlessly continue the work we’ve been doing in support of our client, as well as help them adjust to the new way of working. Throughout our experience helping the CIO, we’ve found success in thinking critically about the problems they are facing and bringing our own knowledge and skills to bear to address them. During the unprecedented pandemic we are currently experiencing, this capability of ours has been as useful and impactful as ever.
