CASE STUDY

Enabling a Digital Workforce by Implementing M365 

The Solution Strategy

The Challenge

We worked with a federal agency to migrate its large productivity and collaboration suite, a set of tools used daily for its teams supporting internal infrastructure and operations, to the M365 cloud-hosted environment. The agency’s mission was to reduce Operations and Maintenance (O&M) costs overall. The agency also wanted to provide opportunities for future scalability, enhancements, and flexibility. This program delivered key cost-savings for the agency, mapped to delivery of modernization and strategic pillars, as well as through reducing technical debt. Makpar supported this effort by providing overall Program Management, including technical subject matter expertise and execution support.

This is an enterprise service supporting 90+ thousand users, 481 terabytes (TB) of total email data, and over 121M files with a total size exceeding 114 TB.

    • When developing the technical roadmap, we identified business and IT organizational stakeholders and determined which organizations provide governance, which provide technical and personnel support, and which are impacted. We determined budget availability, contract needs, licensing compliance, technical/computing requirements and availability of Development, Test, and Pilot environments.

    • We used this information to develop requirements to determine the impact of the cloud migration as it applies to the agency user population, technical support organizations, and external partners.

    • We worked with the policy ownership organization to determine the scope and relevance of applicable privacy and data security policies to all data within the M365 environment (e.g., Exchange emails, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Power Platform).

    • We gathered and prioritized requirements by working with the appropriate data domain owners.

    • We educated stakeholders on their regulatory compliance needs and how to translate those into effective and enforceable policies in the M365 environment.

    • We developed the technical architecture spanning IRS on-premises, IRS networking, internet vendor networking, and cloud resources. This effort included design of new or updated operational processes for data migration, data governance, security controls, and resource provisioning.

    • Makpar supported joint design sessions with agency technology experts, cloud provider experts, and supporting vendor and contractor resources. We aligned architecture, process designs, and framework assessments to overall strategic goals and submitted them for review and approval by customer stakeholders.

Windows Environment/Platform

Entra ID

(formerly known as Azure Active Directory)

Reduced Time:

Ensured smooth transition to project goals while maintaining security and compliance.

SharePoint

We developed and led the overall implementation strategy with a cross-organization, multi-discipline group consisting of key stakeholders from network management, security, and operations.

We implemented a Human-Centered-Design focused process development approach that brought together dispersed teams and built consensus on overall strategy, program objectives, and agency goals.

Tools Used

Best Practices

Through this increased cross-steam collaboration, we were able to:

1. Reduce Duplicated Efforts: We identified teams that worked on same items in different ways (Optimized Search Functionality), enhancing overall user experience.

2. Remove Silos: By identifying opportunities to increase collaboration, we were able to help in removing silos.

Purview

We achieved consensus and minimized disruption to users. To do so, our subject matter experts provided design services to support product development teams. We led working sessions with IT operational groups and security administrators to identify and test integration points prior to deploying the solution into the production environment. 

Created repeatable processes that increased overall efficiency, including:

  • Developed tactical plans and execution processes, supported the Enterprise Lifecycle and Tech Insertion Lifecycle processes 

  • Developed and executed a communications plan

  • Identified and tracked key performance indicators

Benefits & Results for Clients

Main Benefits for Clients

Increased End User Satisfaction:

Simplified overall user experience by consolidating file storage and workflows into a single unified platform and improved collaboration capabilities across the organization.

Other Benefits Achieved

M365 permits collaboration between all 90k+ employees and contractors. All business units and their delivery partners rely on M365 as their primary program/project management document repository.

Want to discuss how Makpar can help achieve your agency’s modernization goals? Get in touch with us today.

Reduced Technical Debt:

This work accelerated the adoption of Cloud based offerings.

PowerBI

We also provided ongoing project management support, including: coordinated with vendors, created user guides and other training materials, and delivered monthly status reports.

Reduced Potential for Technical Debt in the Future:

Set up a Continuous Automatic Update Approach.

Our Communities of Practice (CoP) emphasis is centered on bringing silos and disparate groups together to develop change management best practices (specifically security change management). This has greatly improved security change management compliance and reduced time/effort to obtain Authority to Operate (ATO).

  • Promoted digital workforce capabilities across multiple agency networks with diverse and nationwide dispersed user base.

  • Designed improvements to support enhancements and information sharing with integrated applications and data access to support business functions and workflows.

  • Upgraded systems and code to take advantage of new technologies and tools.

Key Takeaways