COVID was hard. Seems like an obvious statement but I genuinely think we have collective amnesia about that time.
Like most, my employer was fully office based at the time. We ran a ‘classic’ Microsoft house, with onsite AD and an application server for various bits. Most machines were desktop PCs, however I had begun a programme of replacing these with laptops throughout earlier that year.
Mondays were a big day in the office. Whole company meetings, departmental meetings and other mandated activities all happened each and every week on that day so it was always a bit crazy in the office.
As talk of COVID rose in the news I called a meeting with the CTO and my direct report where I asked them to play a war game. What would happen if tomorrow we couldn’t return to the office? What would break?
First was the PCs. We were probably 75% through our replacement program so I got permission to replace the rest with immediate effect. The second was our application server. This was used by the Finance department for our Sage application and the fat client was faaaaaat. It wouldn’t be able to operate remotely.
Third was Mondays. And this is where I was pleasantly surprised. I asked that on Thursday that week, everyone is told that the office will be closed on Monday and everyone needs to work from home. The timescale was important - it had to be a shock so everyone would need to react quickly. I emphasized the importance of this as an excercise. The business had to be aware that Monday could break, that parts of the business might not function. But we needed to know if it broke while we were in a position to fix it. Not necessarily from an IT perspective, but from a business one. What processes will fail, what meetings wouldn’t work, how would our staff be impaired by having to find space at home.
It was approved. On Monday we would close the office.
We got to work replacing the final desktops. We selected the best desktops, reimaged them, installed Sage and enabled RDP, configuring the Finance laptops with VPN access and RDP shortcuts to the machines. Hacky and horrible, but it was all we could do with the time and money available.
Monday came and… nothing was broken. Everyone logged on to the company meeting and the CEO emphasized the need for anything and everything to be jotted down and reported.
We checked in with Finance and all was fine with them. We started drawing up plans on how we would deal with sending and receiving broken devices to end users. We had identified supplier inventory as a risk so ordered a mass of spare laptops and sent them to mine and my direct reports house for keeping. A process was put in place that anything entering anyones home would be quarantined for 96 hours before anything could be done with it. Joiners and Leavers processes were audited and anything that this potential new reality could break was pre-emptively fixed.
By Wednesday the company sent out an email saying that if people did not feel safe coming to the office they could work from home if they wish.
Two weeks later the first of the UK lockdowns was announced.
By listening to their lowly IT department, the business had given themselves a headstart of 3 weeks to tweak, fine tune, and fix any part of the business that may be affected by lock down.
We didn’t loose a single day of man hours during the whole of the COVID period. No one was furloughed and the business continued operating at 100% for the entire time.
A month later I called my boss and my direct report in to a meeting. What would happen if we could never return to the office. We roleplayed, drew up plans and got to work.
At the height of the COVID lockdowns Regus gave us two weeks notice to vacate the building as it was being sold.
The company never returned to a full office environment.
You’ll notice a lack of technical solutions mentioned above. Although I definitely wore out my technical hat during this time I feel its important to emphasize that not all solutions are technical ones, and that if all you do is use your knowledge and experience to provide purely technical answers to the problems you face you’re doing yourself a disservice. See “Redefining IT” for further thoughts on this.