Office Buildout & Relocation of 1,400+ Employees

A financial firm tapped TDS to lead a new office build and relocation of 1,400 employees from NYC to NJ.–

Executive Overview 

Our client is one of the largest financial services firms in the world. This 150-year-old firm offers the broadest types of services – from investment and commercial banking, consumer and retail offerings, wealth management, investor services for asset managers and capital market. With nearly 90,000 employees worldwide and offices in most countries, they have one of the most complex IT platforms to support these many varied business units. They rely on TDS for myriad IT programs and support activities in North America, 

The Challenge   

Initially TDS was engaged to support a 1,400+ person office relocation from New York City to a new to be built office in New Jersey. Concurrent to this build out and office relocation, the Network, Data Center and Technology teams were planning to make critical upgrades to the back-end infrastructure focusing on improving the user experience through new PC & VDI technologies, leading edge collaboration tools, state of the art security and storage systems, and public cloud services.  

With multiple disciplines from each of the support services teams needed to work seamlessly – while meeting critical project deadlines – coordination was a must as engineers and specialist were located in various locations and time zones. With a must move date 12 months ahead, everything was in the critical path and there was no room for dates to slip.  

The Solution 

At project inception, TDS gathered the key stakeholders together to outline the program goals and critical success factors. After presenting the approach to senior management and getting approval to move forward, TDS stood up a cloud-based Project Management Office platform to schedule and track progress, flag & highlight critical areas that might be a challenge for the team and provide detailed progress reports for the team members and senior management. 

We then worked closely with the NY and NJ facilities teams to capture & document the current IT and required peripherals impacted by the relocation, design various from-to plans with floorplans and elevations and determine what new gear would be needed and what devices could be decommissioned.  

Coordinating various trades at both locations was another area that required exact timings. Transportation logistics across two states with significant urban density provided additional challenges as seed equipment needed to go into the new location first to bring up the temporary network. Once the new facility was ready for migration activities, TDS scheduled 20 move wave weekends, handling up to 100 users per event. This allowed the team to judge effectiveness of the approach, tweak or change the move activities, and test the new environment before more significant relocation weekends were planned.  

The Results 

The office relocation proceeded smoothly throughout the move waves, with migrations scheduled around user groups. This allowed teams to remain together and not find them spread across two offices. After the final group was moved in, TDS conducted a post-relocation survey to assess how the experience went for those impacted. We were able to achieve an above 90% satisfaction rating from those who responded, with good feedback capture to help tweak and improve the IMAC process going forward.  

As a result of this project’s success, TDS was asked to help with additional branch office refreshes throughout North America. Another follow-on request was to assist them with a data center upgrade in Virginia and Texas. Today we remain a trusted resource for their teams to turn to as they know that we are responsive, knowledgeable and extremely familiar with their operations & business processes.