Anglain Water Infrastructure Upgrade

Background
Anglian Water is one of the UK’s largest geographical water companies.  They deliver water and sewerage in one of the driest regions in the UK.

Issues
Anglian Water had just entered a phase of capital investment in their IT infrastructure.  The plan was to replace all 10,000 desktops and 700 laptops with a move from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.  At the time Windows Vista had been released but was not sufficiently tested in the corporate environment for the company.

Solution
We sat on the main project board offering advice about the relationships between the infrastructure upgrade and all the other upgrade projects which included routing voice over VOIP, Domain controllers, Convergent Network and a companywide microwave network.
We took the lead in delivering training to end users and planning the hardware replacement in the offices.  We built and ran a team of Anglian Water and agency staff in order to deliver the project.  Our team shaped the design of security and testing releases ready for the end user.
Communication was the key factor to this project.  We co-ordinated the delivery of information from the IT contractor building, the releases, Hardware deployment teams, Office co-ordinators, trainers, end users and directors.

Applications
We built an MS access database to automatically e-mail end users their training dates.  We designed a matrix to display all sites and number of users to be upgraded.  This also showed the dates for awareness training, hardware delivery, floor walking and handover to IT support.
We used SharePoint to run Risk and Issues logs, logging of knowledge and a central link of information and links to the team.