Eleven offices, one standard, and somebody local in every one.

The situation

Multi-site work is where inconsistency becomes expensive. Eleven offices that each solved the same problems differently is eleven networks nobody can support efficiently and eleven sets of surprises.

The remote sites do not carry the same onsite coverage as the headquarters, which is a deliberate and sensible cost decision. What it means in practice is that somebody local has to be able to act as remote hands when something needs a person.

So the hard part of opening an office in a city you are not in is not the technology. It is knowing who to call in that city.

What we did

One standard, applied everywhere. The same equipment, configured the same way, documented the same way, so a technician who has never visited a site can still work on it confidently.

Part of the project management of opening each location is establishing the vendor bench there before it is needed: a low-voltage contractor, a print vendor, a phone vendor, each one found, vetted and introduced while there is time to choose rather than during an outage.

For build-outs far from home we fly our own people out and build it ourselves. We do not use the field-services marketplaces that let you order a technician like a taxi. The quality is not there, and the person who shows up has no idea what they are walking into.

Eleven offices that behave like one. A new site opens on a known sequence with a known vendor list, and the people at headquarters do not find out about problems from the staff there.

The vendor bench is the part other providers skip, and it is the part that makes the difference at eleven o'clock on the morning of a move.

Questions people ask about this