You’ve already committed the company to an Office 2007 migration, and the learning curve alone promises grief. Factor in the current financial climate and the overwhelming pressure to pull off a successful migration, and you have full-on agita.
Software migrations will no doubt cause disruptions in at least three areas over several months. But if you approach it with a thought-out plan, you can lessen the sting.
Where’s the File Menu?
The first and most obvious impact will be on your employees. Features they have used for years are suddenly, um, somewhere else. The interface changes in Office 2007 are substantial enough that without training and support before and throughout a migration, even the savviest users will be lost.
“How will an overall decrease in productivity affect your company’s numbers? In a word, nightmarishly.”
Callers are in Queue
Immediately after deployment, employees will bombard the internal help desk with support questions, on top of their regular requests for forgotten passwords and more mailbox size. It’s hard to keep up a balancing act like that, even more so when employees make it over the initial learning hump and begin finding features that are new to the version. That’s 2.0.
The Bottom Line
How will an overall decrease in productivity affect your company’s numbers? In a word, nightmarishly. If John Q. Embeeay is churning out a dozen reports a day using Access and Excel 2003, how long will it take him to get back up to that level using 2007?
Whether it is learning how to use the new ribbon interface or adjusting to file formats, employees and help desks will face a learning curve of some capacity. Productivity, the backbone of a company, will suffer without a migration partner and plan in place. (Jen Darr)
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