Network Migrations: Finding the 'Why' Behind a Tech Giant’s Bottlenecks

Big tech runs on data, but sometimes spreadsheets miss the real story – especially when navigating complex design projects.

Recently, the Pivot team was tapped to consult on a massive network migration for a tech giant. Our mission was to uncover the bottlenecks holding their project back and help pave the way for a smooth migration process. The numbers showed delays, but we were determined to find the "why."

For those unfamiliar, network migrations involve moving an organization's data, applications, and hardware to a new or upgraded system, all while ensuring compatibility and minimizing downtime. For our team, this meant a crash course in IT knowledge. Suddenly, we were neck-deep in data centers and network designs.

From experience, however, we knew this project would be more than just a technical and logistical challenge. IT infrastructure is interwoven with the very fabric of an organization – the processes, the politics, and the people with their deeply ingrained habits.

Finding the real bottlenecks meant becoming translators between the company's intricate IT systems and the humans who used and managed them.

Unlocking User Needs for Smoother Network Migrations

To unpack the migration's issues and pinpoint solutions, we embarked on a multi-step plan that prioritized user insights through qualitative methods.

Interviews formed the cornerstone of our strategy. And we conducted a lot of them, from the technical trenches of IT to C-suite boardrooms.

Here's a breakdown of our exact interview and insights-sharing process:
 

• Persona-Informing Interviews: We conducted a series of key stakeholder interviews to establish the project's primary personas and clarify unique company needs.
• Primary Interviews: Next, we conducted over 45 interviews targeting employees directly involved in the migration process, executives, team leaders, and leaders and engineers who had experience with previous migrations.
• Interview Synthesis: We synthesized our interview notes to uncover recurring themes, providing a crucial roadmap for our research into the organization's structure, network migration workflows, and cultural challenges.

As we dug deeper into the interviews, patterns started to emerge, many hinting at challenges far beyond technical hangups. Snags in the migration, as cited by our interviewees, often pointed toward deeper cultural issues and communication breakdowns within the organization as a whole.

But of course, our interviews were about more than just zeroing in on problems. We wanted to find solutions. So, we distilled everything we learned into a comprehensive Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) Framework – a blueprint outlining actionable steps for each "System Actor" persona within the migration process. We had a roadmap designed to improve everything from daily tasks to company-wide communication, all customized to the real needs of the people involved.

The Results?

We streamlined workflows, suggested key areas where the company could replace unnecessary manual effort with automation, and even ignited a broader cultural shift – all because we took the time to listen.