Open for Remote Business

By Charles Bartholomew, Presales Architect, Unisys

The COVID-19 pandemic is a seismic disruptor changing how enterprises interact with their customers, suppliers, and staff.

And all of us at Unisys are certainly no exception. As a result, we’ve adapted our service delivery model in a way that enables us to continue providing the Agile Business Suite (AB Suite®) user community with valuable, high-quality professional services.

This change actually began well before the pandemic, when we became an early adopter and internal promoter of Zoom. This allowed us to familiarize ourselves with the platform, understand its inherent advantages and constraints, and determine how to better adapt to remote engagement. And, we learned that while video conferencing, digital whiteboards, and desktop control vastly improve the classic conference call, the dynamics will never truly resemble an in-person meeting. The approach to effective remote engagement is not necessarily harder – it’s just different.

What follows are examples of how we’ve used these insights to reshape the way we deliver consultative and training engagements to make them as valuable in a remote setting as they once were in person.

Remote Consultative Services

This past June, we delivered a remote Innovation Workshop for a major client in South America. Traditionally held in person, an Innovation Workshop is an event facilitated by Unisys that’s meant to surface ideas, goals, and challenges, and then turn this input into actionable strategies.

Many of these ideas are captured via a web-based collaboration tool, so the stage was already set to transition the entire event to a virtual setting. We complemented this with a deliberate effort to address many questions related to meeting connectivity and capability prior to the session beginning, which helped to keep participation, energy, and engagement at high levels.

Over 25 individuals attended the virtual Innovation Workshop, with 95% saying they were “satisfied” or
“very satisfied” with the event. The client’s CIO remarked, “I found it interesting, practical, and objective, in addition to the innovative model.”

Remote Training

Historically delivered as in-person classes and workshops at our clients’ sites, our AB Suite training services continue to adapt to accommodate remote learning. While this approach does eliminate many logistical and travel questions, maintaining engagement introduces different challenges than what you’d find in a traditional classroom environment.

We’ve altered the length and pace of our courses in response, leading to a shorter online day. Rearranging the agenda to free more time for practical student exercises emphasizes hands-on learning and interaction, helping to break up the session. When organizing remote learning, some additional upfront coordination is required to ensure students and instructors have secure and adequate access to the proper environments.

The decision to move ClearPath products into the public cloud, as well as to take advantage of tools from the public cloud, helps with this issue. Giving students access to resources in the public cloud means they can utilize secure, preconfigured test and education environments provided directly from Unisys.

In August, we successfully delivered multiple virtual sessions of the “Using Source Control with AB Suite 7.0” course. Not only were learners able to take advantage of the delivery changes noted above, they also had access to revised course content. With a focus on the two modes of Team Foundation Version Control – the on-premise Microsoft® Team Foundation Server 2018 and cloud-based Azure DevOps Services – attendees learned about source control concepts, how to set up each mode, source control operations, and strategies for driving adoption among their development teams.

It’s an understatement to say the way we work has been completely rewritten. Even so, as our efforts to transition traditional, in-person events to a virtual setting illustrate, there is more than one way to reach a positive result. If you’re wondering how to help your business adapt to – and flourish in – these challenging times, please contact your Unisys representative today or email us at ABSuite@unisys.com.