Workday Podcast: Tips for a Virtual Deployment
Scott Palzkill, VP of IT at Alight Solutions, shares best practices and lessons learned from undergoing a virtual deployment.
Deploying new technology is usually met with both excitement and hesitation. While new solutions offer business value, they also require extensive planning to make sure they will enhance, not degrade, current operations.
Throw a global pandemic into the mix, and all that planning has to shift. Suddenly, everyone is remote, and whatever type of deployment was planned before, it must now be a virtual deployment. On this episode of The Workday Podcast, I talk with Scott Palzkill, VP of IT at Alight Solutions, about his best practices and lessons learned from undergoing a virtual deployment.
Listen on SoundCloud: Tips for a Virtual Deployment
Listen on Apple Podcasts: Tips for a Virtual Deployment
Below are some of the key lessons Palzkill shared during our conversation. You can find our other Workday Podcasts here.
“Trust and verify your technology. When the work-from-home mandate happened, we had about a month to prepare for the deployment. We started testing the meeting technology for virtual training right away. We knew we were going to deliver training to 150 people in India from the U.S. at 4 a.m. Central Standard Time, so we didn’t want to have a technical issue at that time of day.”
“Undergoing a virtual deployment requires contingency plans for your contingency plans. If you're able to actually get ahead of it and think through some of the “what ifs,'' it makes the deployment much more feasible. If there's risk to what you're doing, make sure you've got the right tools in place to make people successful. Give them the opportunity to get their questions answered. During our deployment, we set up virtual office hours and held a total of 24 different virtual office hour sessions for our employees.”
“Your change management and communication team is important because when you’re remote, you don't have the drive-by conversation to answer a quick question. You have to be deliberate about what you're trying to do, and leverage your technology resources to make the change successful.”
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