Windows 10 Roadmap for Entertainment Organization

Overview

Our client, an entertainment organization, requested our assistance with a Windows 10 readiness and roadmap project.

Our client’s primary location has approximately 5,000 employees and 2,000 Windows devices, many of which are customer-facing given the nature of the entertainment business. Other categories of devices included shared back-office systems and classic information-worker systems. Each of these categories needed an appropriate security posture and management approach to be applied. Our client also wished to plan for another 1,500 Windows devices in another context.

Solution

We developed a three-phase roadmap and guided our client on best practices around both readiness and actual rollout of Windows 10. Concurrency’s project team included a Windows 10 architect, a business analyst and a project manager. The team conducted work both onsite and remotely, ultimately returning to the client’s location to deliver a summary presentation to the client’s executive team.

The first phase of the roadmap addressed technical gaps that needed attention prior to Windows 10 deployment. These included areas such as security and encryption, infrastructure upgrades, and group policies. We showed our client how addressing these topics up front would avoid the need for software fixes later on.

The roadmap’s second phase focused on how the rollout would occur, including training and other organizational change management. One team drawn from our IT group would train and prepare a department. Then that team would move onto preparing the next department while another team would then handle the actual deployment for the first department. This process enables an organization to gather and build on lessons through each deployment phase, enabling the overall process to flow more and more smoothly over time.

The third phase of the roadmap was forward-looking toward an upcoming version of Windows 10. This phase related especially to our client’s large number of customer-facing “kiosk mode” machines and how to deploy to them automatically. Phase three also addressed how our client could most smoothly begin to move from traditional on-premises deployment approaches to modern IT service management tools.

The project as a whole wrapped up in under a month, giving our client a clear direction and confidence to undertake the Windows 10 migration stage by state in the most effective way—both in technical and broader organizational readiness.