New Zealand social enterprise Mana Services provides youth care, training, support and development services drawing on Māori practices and values. With its staff working entirely remotely, Mana knew its IT services were central to its success.

To get the best out of those services and to manage costs, Mana opted for a wide-ranging IT upgrade covering everything from its website to its document management system and including the migration of its Google Workspace suite to Microsoft 365. Complex and time-consuming, the upgrade required both careful planning and a team with skills and experience in enterprise IT solutions. Mana invited its existing IT services provider to carry out the project but it quickly became apparent that the locally-based provider was out of its depth. Mana had to look elsewhere to get the migration over the line.

DSS stepped into the breach, first bringing in Client Delivery Director Anthony Moore to act as Mana’s virtual CIO. Moore brought his 27 years of experience in programme and project management, operations and enterprise software development to bear, mapping out the migration and preparing an implementation schedule and communications and training plans.

The DSS team adopted a staged approach, addressing each phase in turn and typically migrating each one over a weekend. Over seven months the team tackled Mana’s intranet, Microsoft 365 migration, data storage and systems for HR, mobile management, asset management, document management and more. In the process, it moved more than 200 Slack channels to MS Teams and three TB of data from Google Drive to SharePoint.

Familiar with the charity discounts Microsoft offers, DSS validated Mana with Microsoft, slicing more than 80 percent off regular licence costs. It also consolidated Mana’s various telecommunications services with one supplier, reducing administrative overheads and further trimming costs.

DSS also overhauled Mana’s website, introducing a new content management system (CMS), improving performance by moving to a new host, and adopting a new user interface (UI) and content for a better user experience.

At the time of writing, Mana’s digital transformation was substantially complete, with a new property management tool and other apps about to be introduced. The project is on time and on budget and has been free of the pitfalls common to complex enterprise migrations. Crucially, Mana’s new environment has high levels of security while providing for a large number of guest accounts to accommodate the needs of contract staff.

Mana reports high user satisfaction, in part due to responsive real-time helpdesk support which resolved user issues on the spot. The relationship continues, with DSS now providing ongoing remote IT support and maintenance.