Increasing collaboration & communication amid a pandemic thanks to Google Workspace

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About Cera Care

Cera Care is a London-based technology-enabled home care company. Cera Care was founded in November 2015 by Mahiben Maruthappu and Marek Sacha who formally launched the company in 2016.

Cera Care’s mission is to solve the care challenges and provide people with modern care they rightly deserve. They offer affordable, comprehensive care by combining the power of technology with a uniquely collaborative approach. This way they make it possible for people to live better lives in the place they most want to be: home. It uses an on-demand digital platform to allow families to arrange and schedule home care for elderly relatives.

The Challenge

Cera Care had just acquired another company. It was crucial for Cera Care to bring everyone onboard into their current Google Workspace environment. The timing of the project was particular as the deadline was right in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis. That meant that absolutely everything from the migration set-up to the project management and change management had to be done remotely.

In addition, Cera Care wanted to upgrade their Google Workspace Basic license to a Google Workspace Business license. The biggest impact of the upgrade was the availability of Shared Drives for their staff, and the ability to have broader auditing features. This upgrade would enable a better control and structure of company files on the cloud. The challenge here was to ensure that everyone understood how Shared Drives would impact their way of working and making sure that a new file structure was put in place in a matter of days. 

The Cera Care Teams also needed guidance, training and best practices from Google Cloud experts to get the right instructions from the beginning. 

There was one major challenge in this project: the timeline of the project! The Devoteam G Cloud Team only had 4 weeks to tackle the entire mailing and filing migration for around 300 people all working remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Goal

The goal of the project with partner Devoteam G Cloud was to integrate the new staff within Cera’s infrastructure and educate users in the usage of Google Workspace as a whole. Because Google Workspace is accessed through a web browser, it’s available to all staff wherever they might need it. With Shared Drive, teams can collaborate and connect more efficiently than ever before. 

We had to enable this smooth transition in a matter of 4 weeks amid the Covid-19 crisis.

Solution

Devoteam G Cloud supported Cera Care and their recent acquisition in this transition with both technical activities and change management tasks. 

There were the 3 solutions that were implemented: 

1. Migration to Gmail
   Google Cloud Premier Partner Devoteam G Cloud helped  Cera Care to set up the new environment for 300 users of the newly acquired company. This section of the project was mainly technical but also involved some change management in terms of communication and training of the staff.
2. Migration to Google Drive
   Devoteam G Cloud’s team defined a clear and pragmatic approach to help the newly acquired company to move all their files to the cloud and to get up to speed very quickly on the concepts of Google Workspace. We enabled Google Drive for the new 200 users but also for the current staff. This track was technical but was also closely related to change management as a thorough analysis of their current usage, their current environment and file structure had to be done in just a few days. In addition, our experts provided a new file structure that made sense in Google’s Shared Drive logic. Once that was set up, communication and training were essential parts of the success of this project. And finally, the technical portion of the project could start by moving files from the old server environment to Google Drive.
3. Upgrade of Cera Care’s license to Business licenses
   Cera Care’s staff was already used to the basic G Suite environment. The biggest part of the job here was mainly change management as more than 300 users needed to understand what type of change was at hand and the impact it would have on their way of working. Devoteam G Cloud shared best practices on the new Google Workspace features. 

Thanks to the flexibility of Google Workspace’s tools and the performance of Google Meet, it was possible to make it work. This was also possible thanks to Cera Care who was very engaged in the project from the start and helped the Devoteam G Cloud team to untangle the knots along the way. 

The Result

The most important result of the partnership between Cera Care and Devoteam G Cloud is that Cera Care’s newly acquired company is now fully integrated with Google Workspace. They can now easily communicate using Gmail, book meetings using Google Calendar, and set up a video conference using Google Meet in a matter of seconds. Devoteam G Cloud supported this change by providing Cera Care with communication templates and best practices to carry out the adoption of the tools introduced. 

The Devoteam G Cloud team successfully onboarded the new users to the different tools of G Suite. Document sharing and version control is now easy for all the company thanks to Google Drive and the various Google formats (Docs, Sheets, Slides). 

Cera Care is now using Google Workspace to the fullest, both utilising it for collaboration and communication purposes. They are using Google Drive on a daily, which has given them the possibility to achieve results faster.