Virginia Commonwealth University improves user experience for students and educators with Google Workspace

Client

Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is a higher education urban university with 32,000 students and 8,000 staff and faculty members.

Business challenge

Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is a higher education urban university with 32,000 students and 8,000 staff and faculty members. VCU’s faculty and staff members were using IBM Lotus Notes, a system that the University outgrew from many different aspects. First, VCU’s IT team found the system difficult to maintain, as well as expensive – after spending a considerable amount of money on infrastructure upkeep, VCU decided that their teams simply could not keep up with both the time and cost that Lotus Notes required, and began to evaluate other email and communication platforms. VCU had already moved its student body to Google Workspace for Education, which had an extremely positive reception amongst users and was considered a very successful project. After some deliberation, VCU decided it was time to do the same for faculty and staff.

Solution

Knowing that faculty and staff had complicated workflows within Lotus Notes, Scott Davis, Director of Application Services at VCU and the University’s project manager for the Google Workspace implementation, decided to separate the migration into two different project aspects: the first being the technical migration itself, and the second being the support and communication strategies to supplement the transition. SADA worked closely with VCU for both the Google Workspace migration and change management aspects of the project, with a carefully crafted deployment plan and customized training services. The project kicked off in June 2012, first identifying the departments that were more eager to move to the platform in a phased roll-out. Every week another group of individuals was migrated to the platform, a process that continued for approximately 8 months.

SADA focused on the technical migration by meeting with VCU’s IT team using Google Hangouts on a weekly basis. During these meetings, the two teams spent time reviewing any issues that may have occurred. Change management and training also played a critical role in the successful implementation of Google Workspace. VCU engaged in customized end-user training curriculum, focusing on VCU’s administrative assistants, the group who had the most workflow concerns with the Google Workspace transition. VCU also set up Google Sites, hubs of information and resources for future onboarding and assistance.

Results and benefits

The reception to Google Workspace has been very positive and VCU is continuing to discover different ways of utilizing the platform. While many faculty and staff members immediately picked up on the benefits of Google Drive, users are beginning to explore the capabilities of Google Docs more and more. “Our intention has been to make the user experience easier,” said Davis. Faculty and staff are also leveraging Google Hangouts to make face-to-face meetings fast and simple, and look forward to the frequent rollouts of changes and improvements to the platform.