When half your knowledge workers are using one version and the rest another, that’s a whole lot of lost functionality — and wasted time.

The recession and Office 2007’s immense learning curve are partly to blame, but, ultimately, it’s you, the IT leader, who must take responsibility for diminished return on investment. There’s still time to finish your migration; here are six reasons why you should:

1. ROI: You purchased X number of licenses and only have migrated half. You do the math: You purchased the upgrade for a reason — to take advantage of new and easier to find productivity features.

2. The dreaded Office 2007 learning curve: As evident in the hundreds of expletive-laced Tweets about Office 2007, the new user interface is a downright shock to many knowledge workers. Where’s the file menu? How do you save a document? What is this Ribbon? If you finish your migration, you will not have to face these questions again when you decide to upgrade to the next version (which also has a Ribbon interface).

3. New features: As stated in Reason No. 1, you purchased the upgrade for a reason — to increase worker productivity from the new and improved features (for example, Excel 2007 includes new formulas such as IFERROR, and more columns and rows).

4. The Ribbon is here to stay: Despite the existence of third-party add-ins that make 2007 look and act like 2003, installing them is counterproductive. The beta version of Office 2010 includes the Ribbon interface, and I suspect future versions will too. Embrace it.

5. Document compatibility: When you save 2007 documents in earlier formats, they lose some functionality. When half your knowledge workers are using one version and the rest another, that’s a whole lot of lost functionality — and wasted time.

6. User frustration: See Reasons 2-5.

Time to finish what you started.♦

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

The reports and surveys tell a compelling story. Actual customer feedback is even more powerful.

They are usually exasperated, and often embarrassed. Who wants to admit lack of knowledge, especially if they believe their job is on the line?

The employers themselves, the ones chanting “do more with less, do more with less” at every all-hands and in every company-wide e-memo, are partially to blame. If a corporation doesn’t offer software support, workers must find their own solutions — which usually cost dearly in downtime and lost productivity. If a company does offer how-to support, it’s considered a luxury and its use may be frowned upon. (This recent Dilbert cartoon, sent to me by a colleague, captures it precisely.)

In sour financial times, desktop application support usually is the first to go when budgets are cut. It’s hard to tally its return on investment, and the demand for such support is often hidden.

But the need is there, and even more so now when many companies are operating with fewer employees and the same workload. (See a post I wrote in October titled “Basic Training: Why Workers Need Software Support.”)

The reports and surveys tell a compelling story. Actual customer feedback is even more powerful.

Below is a letter that was sent to us by one of our customers, who was given the job of automating several departmental reports using Access. In her words, the task was “dropped on my plate.”

She and her colleagues were completing monthly updates in PowerPoint, Excel and Access. The updates were tied together but each had its own piece of information, whether it was typing in a completion date or color-coding a text box to show if something was completed on time or was running behind.

She knew there was a way to update more efficiently using Access, but explains, “What I was asking Access to do was far beyond what I could get out of the simple commands and toolbars available.”

Here’s how she solved the problem:

“Not being a guru of Access and needing functionality far beyond the basic options that are built in, I called the help desk. Quickly, I was connected with a pure genius of Access coding and he was able to not only help me build out several nuances, but actually through multiple calls over several months taught me how to do my own coding in Access. The end result was several reports that were exactly what the customer required, even better in both content and visual appeal, that were all generated with a click of the button!”

Her company offers software support, so she was able to find a solution that saved several hundred hours of time in development, plus at least 30 minutes per person per month in update time.

She was given the tools to do more with less, without sacrificing productivity.

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | PC Helps eTraining | Contact PC Helps

Click to download your free Windows 7 and Office 2007 Migration Readiness Kit.

Part One, The Big Picture:

Expert support and training before, during, and after deployment is the key to a successful migration. You will need to tackle the steep learning curve and minimize downtime so your employees can regain the confidence and knowledge necessary to remain productive.

Some questions to keep in mind: If the average end-user was completing 30 tasks per day prior to migrating, what will it take to bring them back up to that level once Windows 7 and Office 2007 are deployed?

• Technical support and training for employees before, during, and after migration.
• Live, expert support and training, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• Focused project timelines to coordinate deployment, support and training.
• Awareness campaigns that let employees know where to get software help.

Do you have enough internal bandwidth and full-time employees to learn, teach, deploy and support this migration? If not, you will need the following:

• Assistance fielding immediate migration questions, which allows your internal IT staff to attend to deployment procedures and day-to-day support calls outside the Microsoft package. This allows you to maintain call flow and eliminate call abandonment and employee frustration.
• Ongoing call analysis and solution-based reporting to identify target training needs.
• Office 2007 training options, including custom, interactive, group, individual and on-demand training, plus a self-help knowledgebase.
• With a usage-based migration program, you will not need to hire additional full-time employees, a consulting group, or outside trainers.

If you are surprised by the work that goes into a migration, you should be.

Part Two, the Readiness Checklist:
You want successful transition to Windows 7 and Office 2007, and early ROI. In order to meet those goals, you need to keep your employees informed and trained before, during and after deployment. With a plan in place, you will minimize or eliminate dips in productivity and give your workers confidence to use the tools they rely on every day. This is what you should expect from a migration partner:

Before

• Educate employees about what’s to come via e-mail, newsletters or the company intranet
• Create an employee education campaign, with live, expert training and support
• Offer instructor-led, Internet-based training
• Provide access to a self-service learning portal with hundreds of Windows 7 and Office 2007 audio & visual tutorials
• Train internal IT staff on basic, intermediate and advanced frequently asked questions
• Alter voice response unit (VRU) message to address specific migration calls

During

• Continue employee education campaign, with live, expert training and support
• Offer instructor-led, Internet-based training
• Provide access to a self-service learning portal with hundreds of audio & visual tutorials
• Provide immediate, expert support on Windows 7 and Office 2007 applications, 24 hours a day, seven days a week
• Deliver “type 2″ and related topic training to all employees during and following support calls
• Offer live, web-based training sessions covering specific applications: Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook; beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Select group, individual or customized sessions

After

• Continue employee education campaign, with live, expert training and support
• Continue to offer instructor-led, Internet-based training
• Provide access to a self-service learning portal with hundreds of audio & visual tutorials
• Solution-based call details, productivity measures
• Call analysis identifying targeted training needs
• Quality assurance program measuring user satisfaction, call complexity reporting and downtime analysis
• Monthly e-mail newsletter featuring tips, tricks and shortcuts

If you are surprised by the amount of work that goes into a migration, you should be. It’s not a simple upgrade. No need for concern, though — that’s the migration partner’s job.

There are awareness campaigns to launch before, questions to field during, and inevitable glitches to handle after. And that’s just a slice of what to expect.

Part Three, the Matrix:

At no other time is staffing more important than during a migration, when employees will be struggling with or even resistant to the challenges of change. There are education awareness campaigns to launch before, questions and install issues to field during, and inevitable glitches to handle after. And that’s just a slice of what to expect.

You have four basic choices in staffing for a migration: hiring additional full-time employee(s); bringing in temp workers; contracting with an all-in-one outsourcer; or hiring a best-of-breed company. (Of course there’s a fifth choice – migrating without a staffing plan – but we’ll skip that option. You should too.)

Here’s a look at the pros and cons of each:

In principle, hiring additional full-time employees keeps the control in your hands, but doesn’t make sense financially or logistically. You will need to train new employees on Windows 7 and the entire Office 2007 suite, pay benefits, and dole out extra expenses for an after-hours support skeleton crew.

Such a significant time and money investment (at about $85 per call) does not make sense when you consider that you have no guarantee the new FTEs and your existing IT staff will be able to cover a full-swing migration while maintaining their regular duties. What’s more, your new employees will be generalists, supporting only a dozen or so applications. The average peak hold time for this solution is nine minutes, and the call abandonment rate is 10 percent.

At an average of $96 a call, temps are pricier than their full-time counterparts, and don’t even deliver better service (15 percent abandonment rate). A temp solution offers generalist support and an average 15-minute hold time during peak hours. It does not provide training, advanced Office 2007 and Windows 7 support, or awareness campaigns.

Choosing a larger outsourcer seems like a smart option if you already contract with one for other services. At $59 on average per call, this option is cheaper than hiring temps and full-timers. Also, some all-in-ones offer training in conjunction with a migration. The downside: The staff is mostly generalists whose first language is not English. Some big outsourcers employ tiered-model desks as well. When you factor in the 10-minute peak hold time and 15 percent call abandonment rate, this option loses its luster.

The fourth option, a best-of-breed, is often written off as boutique-y and expensive, and even more so during an economic downturn. The offerings are definitely high-end: domestic Microsoft-certified consultants; support for more than 160 applications, including advanced-level Office 2007; training courses and awareness campaigns; after-hours support; no hold time; a call abandonment rate of .01 percent; and a 91 percent first-call resolution rate. The price is anything but expensive, however, at an average of $25 per call.

FIND MORE INFO IN: Office 2007 Migration Checklist + Tools | Migration Case Study (.pdf) | PC Helps eTraining | Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

They’re valuable people to have on your team. If only more of your employees were so clever with the computer, your business would hum.

Shadow support may seem harmless, but it’s actually taking two employees away from their jobs. That’s double-downtime.

Unfortunately, not everyone’s strength is software or logic — and that’s just fine. (I can’t do my own taxes; that’s why I outsource it to my mother.) However, you cannot continue relying on the office computer guy forever. As much as he saves your office’s collective rear-end on a regular basis, the time he’s spending doing something other than his job is costing you dearly.

There are two types of downtime: unavoidable and avoidable. Unavoidable downtime includes hardware malfunctions or network connectivity problems — problems that will always exist and are really just part of running an IT infrastructure.

Avoidable downtime is where the office expert comes in, and includes shadow support, self-help, and no help at all.

Shadow support is defined as one employee asking a colleague (the office tech “expert”) for assistance with their problem. While it may seem harmless, it’s actually taking two employees away from their primary job functions to solve a problem. That’s double-downtime.

Other instances of avoidable downtime include self-help, which is a proven time waster; and no help at all, which means employees are finding unreliable workarounds.

Both hurt you in the end (see an earlier post, Chaos Among the Calculations) and all three affect your TCO, or total cost of ownership.

According to research performed by Cap, Gemini, Ernst & Young, non-IT employees spend nearly 136 hours per year trying to solve computer-related problems. In an ongoing end-user survey conducted by PC Helps Support over the past 15 years, knowledge workers estimate that without an immediate, reliable outlet for software application support, they would spend an average of three hours per incident trying to resolve the question or problem on their own.

The productivity impact of this avoidable downtime is huge. If a worker making $52,000 annually spends three hours on one solution without support, that costs you $75. That same worker will likely need help on other software issues four times per year, which bumps up the cost to $300. In a company with 1,200 end-users, with a 50 percent population call projection, each seeking help four times per year: 600 x $300 = $180,000. Huge, indeed. (Jen Darr)

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Hidden Demand | Contact PC Helps