Infrastructure Upgrade for P&G

P&G Paris Cutover, July 2020

Deployed a project of infrastructure Upgrade for P&G Paris

The Work Included:

• Identification and allocation of the right staff for the project
• Assistance planning; completed the project plan
• On site deployment
• Monitoring and reporting
• Final report of lessons learned

Deployment Included:

• Switches and Routers upgrade
• Server upgrade/replacement
• Finalized on site configuration of switches and routers (with remote support)
• Finished cabling to extend the wi-fi network
• Configured and Installed over 80 Aps

Project duration: 2 weeks

Staff / Team:

• 2 CCNA level engineers
• 4 cabling engineers
• IT Concierge provided and managed the that staff for the operation

Provided by the Customer:

• 1 facilitator on site, (local access logistic, etc)
• 2 engineers were provided by the ISP, worked remotely
• 1 project manager worked remotely
• 1 Network architect provided guidance and remote support
• 1 Network administrator provided guidance and remote support

Communication:

Our project manager (CCNA) from the IT Concierge team communicated on a daily basis with the customer’s PM (daily update in the form of a progress report).

He also liaised with external providers and the local customer contacts on site in order to coordinate and perform the work on site.

The project manager provided a daily progress report.

Lessons Learned

We provided a final report including a lesson learned report (applying PMP/PMI standards)

Point to Improve:

• Discrepancy between site survey and what was found on site
• Rack elevation of switches (labelling) did not match.
• The site survey was outdated and incomplete; equipment was added/removed after the survey, that caused time waste during the deployment.
• We advise to review the site survey or to perform a more recent site survey before cutover

Roles & Responsibility:

• We advised to review and clearly define roles and responsibilities before the project start
• In this project roles were not clearly defined
• The problems that generated were technicians getting a lot of requests from different partners/customer, also customer contacted directly our techs asking to perform tasks that are out of scope
• This can also be confusing for onsite teams, discouraging and bad for a project

3. Rights and access (planning)

• Access to working places & equipment
• Badges with the technical room access are necessary to perform onsite work,
• Problem: techs spent time running around trying to find someone to open the doors.
• Remote access to devices
• We reckon that accessibility to remote devices has to be done first, so remote engineers can set to do their work Problems: on site techs spent hours waiting impacts the budget
• In view of these problems, this is what we recommend:
  • Local access rights Access to the Local network facilitates the work. (even if it is restricted)
  • At least the team leader / the network engineer, having a company computer with an internet access, Customers often provide us with a company PC or Laptop with local right to do the job.

4. Meeting time

• • We advise to decide what meetings are important to attend (for our teams)
  • Problem: Meeting: We lost at least 30mn per meeting. Equivalent to 3h or more per day

Starting times:

Improve by synchronizing starting times with other teams, often teams waited hours before they could start working.