Communication Around Your Windows 11 Migration
Teamwork, collaboration and information sharing are essential to ensuring a smooth rollout.
- “Maximize your user engagement, particularly in experience testing. Take their feedback and use it to tailor how you communicate about the migration to different business areas.” — Powers
- “Invest in user training. You can move to a new OS where everything is improved, but people need to know what’s in it for them and how to put it to work.” — Lopez
- “Collaboration among technicians ensures quick resolution of problems through near real-time information sharing.” — McPhail
- “Communicate often within your agencies, even if it means sharing barriers to moving forward. The transparency provided by a roadmap helps internal communication tremendously.” — Sripada
- “Develop a comprehensive communication strategy, including operations, IT management, leadership and management, and others. This will include the planned methodology and approach, tentative schedules and courtesy communication for labor unions and other stakeholders.” — Sripada
Planning Requires a Roadmap to Windows 11
Create a detailed roadmap that everyone can follow from start to finish.
- “Make sure your help desk is prepared for the move. For this deployment, we rewrote our help desk support contract to include surge capability.” — Powers
- “Plan for adequate lead time and funding to address technology needs and labor resources. We’re working to ensure sufficient upfront planning to reduce the migration window needed to complete the upgrades and streamline the process.” — Sripada
- “You have to think about application rationalization. Are we currently paying for tools that we’ll no longer need once we have Windows 11? What new features or capabilities does the OS offer, and what should that mean for our IT portfolio?” — Lopez
- “Establish hardware prerequisite planning early. We’ve already begun necessary Windows 11 hardware requirements gathering, and we’re performing market research activities to understand the marketplace for vendors, resellers and manufacturers, and the availability of hardware and software.” — Sripada
- “We are collapsing organizational networks into a single service provider that can more easily migrate endpoint devices in bulk using automated tools. New endpoints added to the architecture will automatically be provisioned with Windows 11.” — McPhail
READ MORE: Get additional tips on how to ace your Windows 11 migration.
Thorough Testing that Starts Small and Scales
Identify potential issues early in the process by investing in a pilot program.
- “We don't like to have people store files on their computers because we want to be able to upgrade them. If a computer breaks, we want to be able to drop another computer on your desk, and it should have all your files there. We sync to OneDrive so we can do upgrades fairly quickly.” — Noga
- “Beyond laptops and other client devices, include accessory devices as part of your testing. Ensuring monitor, docking station, external camera and printer compatibility is as important as ensuring laptop compatibility.” — Sripada
- “One of the things we’ve learned is that you have to prepare for it. Take the time up front. We generally pilot within the IT group before we actually deploy it more broadly.” — Noga