Project Stories Accomplish an incredibly huge project with teamwork:
Implementation of G Suite™ into a major SPA

“It is extremely rare that such a large number of members across multiple departments get together for one single project,” recalls Shinsuke Uchida, the project manager. The above-mentioned major SPA had brought multiple departments responsible for production, logistics, shop management, and other operations together in one place, thereby proceeding with a workstyle reform project to ensure that all the departments constantly collaborate with each other to accelerate business deployment. In February 2018, as a trigger to further accelerate this reform, the idea of implementing G Suite surfaced. With a high expectation to make communication among employees around the world more smooth and speedy, the SPA consulted with SoftBank dealing with digital transformation for corporate customers.

Usually the implementation of G Suite with 10,000 or more licenses is treated as a large-scale project. However, this project involved an extraordinarily large number of licenses. Further, at that time this customer was using a cloud-type groupware provided by other company. As a matter of course, these two services have clear differences in functionality, and their usability, specifications, and user-interfaces also differ significantly. It can be said that these differences make this switchover meaningful. However, this switchover to G suite would impact not only the customer’s communication platform but also its entire IT infrastructure. In order to enable the customer to make an official decision to implement G Suite, the project team needed to assess what impact the switchover would have, calculate how much it would cost, and present the estimated cost. Although the cost was supposed to be presented just as a ballpark estimate, the preliminary calculation should cover not only the scope of services provided by SoftBank but also the scope of services provided by other companies the customer would consider for combined use. Accordingly, it took two months to estimate the total cost for the switchover.

The sales representative is Mai Yuasa, who had just been appointed to be in charge of corporate customer accounts. To conduct the assessment of the scope of impact and the estimation of total cost, both essential for Yuasa to prepare a request for proposal (RFP), in addition to three principal members including system engineers specialized in G Suite, the company appointed a project manager and full-time specialists of relevant fields, such as operational design, network, global affairs, and mobile. And then, a large project with more than ten members in total was launched.

In April, Kosuke Nasu, a system engineer in charge of G Suite, was stationed at the customer’s office almost every day to continually communicate the specifications and characteristics of the G Suite service as well as points to note when implementing it. Meanwhile, team members at SoftBank were sorting out additional requests from the customer Yuasa brought back each day as necessary tasks for the switchover to G Suite. This was because the customer asked her to identify the scope of impact and necessary tasks for the switchover to G Suite as reference information to formulate an RFP. The RFP formulated by the customer based on the information was delivered to candidate service providers in July. However, we found the subsequent preparation of specific proposals much more difficult. There were many items whose cost could not be calculated without asking subcontractors for help, resulting in a tremendous amount of emails exchanged. While the project team was in the process of preparing proposals, new conditions were relentlessly added one after another. The addition of new conditions caused the scope of impact to change, and then documenting them in detail and presenting the resulting document to the customer caused additional requests to come in. As gargantuan work was continuing with no end in sight, the team members repeatedly brushed up proposals while adding prerequisites one by one. Strangely enough, under such tough conditions, the team never lost its vigor.

Despite the limited time left before the submission due date, all the project members worked together to compile responses to the RFP as a proposal document and submitted the fruit of their hard work to the customer on time. The details of the proposal created by the team satisfied the customer, leading to the announcement of the largest-ever implementation of G Suite. The most decisive factor in this success is that SoftBank set up a project team mainly composed of the members who calculated approximate cost and the members engaging in the building and operation of services being offered, while utilizing the knowhow obtained from the development of a communication platform for the opening of the customer’s new office eight years ago and the knowhow from the migration to a cloud service implemented a year and a half ago. With a deep understanding of the customer, all the team members kept an eye on fields other than their own and were willing to take time to exchange views.

As a result of frequent visits to the customer, Nasu built a strong relationship of trust. He went a step further and drew out information that cannot be elicited without such a strong tie with the customer, playing an important role in increasing the accuracy of proposals. He recalls that openly communicating the weak points of G Suite enabled him to further deepen the relationship of trust.

The proposal document submitted this time could cover the areas of services offered by other companies, but that would involve additional man-hours other than those for the G Suite implementation and unnecessary one-time expenses. As a result of considering what should be priority from the perspective of the person in charge of this project on the customer side, the team was able to offer an efficient implementation plan with waste thoroughly eliminated.