Introduction

For my project I was invited to a contract working for an HRM business called Copia Professional Services. Copia specializes in being an HR firm for other HRM businesses and some international clients. This business is approximately around 1-5 employees and as of writing contains no major infrastructure when it comes to servers, switches, and IT gear.

Copia Professional Services is owned by a women called Anna-Marie Hubbard, she was the main point of contact at this business and originally approached me on the contact in question. The contract would take place from January 1st to April 7th 2021. The contact outlined job duties three major ones was the IT support desk role. During periods from Monday through Friday 8-5, I needed to have a phone on me and a machine to process any and all requests which came in. This position was more on standby and was not paid if I was not doing work. The second aspect of the job was a project procurement role. Specified in the next section, Anna Marie wanted to purchase new equipment; it would be my responsibility to research, advise, and implement the equipment as needed. Finally the final piece of the contact was assisting Copia Professional Services move to a new CRM tool while they dropped their old one. The tool was unspecified at the time, but if data transferring needed to happen then it was my responsibility to ensure the data was in fact transferred.

Over the period of this contact there were additional tasks discussed but not added on. Some of which concerned server procurement or networking deployment down the road with the possibility of a new office. I didn’t bother to pursue this part of the contact and move onto another role preferably a permanent position at a larger business.

Upon signing into this role, the sensitive nature of the contact I am unable to discuss specifics such as machine specifications, IPs, where machines will go to specific employees, security, and overall the IT backend aspect of Copia. I can however discuss the concepts just not the details. Seeing this I have adjusted the original documentation provided to align with what I can and cannot discuss. I have shifted the majority of this document to a method piece on how I came to solutions and what happened with the solutions in place.

Since the contract was subject to change at any time this document was written at the end of the course to go over the topics which actually happened rather than pages of irrelevant subjects.

Part One - Computers

Arguably one of the biggest portions of this project was the computers. Currently Copia was operating on refurbished machines they purchased around four years ago. These machines were beginning to feel their age get in the way of their production environment. Anna Marie felt that they needed a drastic upgrade to not only push them into 2021 but also help their production workflow from start to finish.

Naturally the first thing I tracked down was use cases and how the general workflow of Copia looks like. A trend I encountered was that staff have a difficulty with the current display size and their ability to display things to clients. One repeated concern was that employees found it hard to show clients documents on their laptops and interact with the laptop/document as well. I raised the question of potentially investing in touch screen machines. With their old machines they needed docusigners or specific programs and equipment to replicate a clients signature, when potentially a touch screen machine and a laptop can do something very similar. Anna Marie and I sat down and discussed various types of machines from desktops to tablets. We eventually settled on 2 in 1 laptops. Unlike tablets these machines are laptops first, which have the secondary ability to act like a table by folding the screen 360 degrees. This would allow for usual display sizes such as 13 and 15 inch and also have the ability to flip to sign documents or even display to clients naturally on a worksite.

With the type of machines locked down, the next thing to do is actually select the model we want to use. Anna Marie was quick to go to best buy and begin looking at consumer laptops, but I had a conversation with her about consumer vs business machines. One is much more robust, rigid, and better bang for your buck when it comes to purchasing machines. I sat down with her and we went through the various brands of machines and I opted and was enthusiastic with the Lenovo ThinkPad lineup. They are proven and tested industry machines which do what they are suppose to do without any extra problems or bloat in the way. One conversation with a Lenovo business rep led me to the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga line. A Thinkpad in a 2 in 1 layout. These machines were basically your usual Thinkpad with the ability to flip and work as a tablet with of course the Lenovo Stylus. All of the devices would need to be configure to be given straight to an employee with no configuration, this is where I stepped in.

After a discussion on what machines she had as options, we decided these would be the ones to purchase. I set up the Lenovo account and completed the purchase forms and the computers were ordered.

With the machines on route there was specific requests for each machines. All of them required the whole office suite be downloaded and the employees accounts be logged in and installed for immediate use. The other installs would be the Cisco Webex, Teams, Skype, and Zoom; again all of these would need their respective employees details inputted and they logged in for immediate use.

The other aspect of this install was the protecting certain files during the transfer. All machines submitted had their files backed up to a secure Turnkey NAS server I virtualized on my network. This machine has no internet access and is turned off unless needed. All the files were backed up here, only some computers needed these files transferred depending on the type of file and the employee which needed them. The second backup I made was of specific mission critical machines. These laptops were used by main people and would be backed up as actual virtual machines in the event that the install was either missing some files or mission program data from the old machines before getting wiped. This again had no Internet access and is turned off unless needed by the client. I plan to hold onto these backups until May 1st 2021 where after they will be destroyed.

The old machines would fall into one of two categories. Either they would be prepared to be used by Anna Marie’ grand children, or be recycled into a ready to go machine for any employee signing onto Copia’s team. These laptops would have the same base software packages just no files or login credentials since the employee coming in does not currently work there.

Overall the entire research and procurement aspect took around around 2 weeks to sit down, debate and discuss the various options and approaches. The install of the machines took around 4 days over a weekend. I collected the machines the Friday and returned the following Monday. The install went very smoothly and I had no tickets or reports about a misconfigured machine after the install and deployment of the whole project.

Part Two - CRM Tool

With entering Copia they had just left their previous CRM tool. This tool was called Bullhorn. Apparently Anna Marie and the rest of staff found it ok to work with but overall it didn’t fit the environment at Copia. When they left Bullhorn did not hand over the majority of their entire data they had collected. They currently are partially rebuilding that data with what they had left over. My purpose in this aspect of the project is to source a new CRM and help them get the service online and ready to go.

Upon talking to Anna Marie about various different alternatives and options she wanted to go with a product she has used in the past. This product was called Salesforce. Salesforce is generally a SaaS purchased on their servers. Clients connect in through the API and work remotely. She was already familiar with it and able to understand how it works and how she could use in her environment. My immediate responsibilities would be to reach out get an idea of how to implement her recovered data and go from there.

Upon reaching out I got the first set of meetings out the way with their reps and eventually we got a Salesforce rep to sit down and talk with us. They very quickly wanted to work specifically with the owner who would use it that would be Anna Marie. They proceeded to have various other meetings about the topic I wasn’t invited to. But overall once the conversation was rolling it was easily completed. The final aspects of the entire solution would be the data transfer. According to a call with Anna Marie that was an entire support branch with Salesforce. They handled this.

The final aspect of the whole situation was the deployment of Salesforce. This was wrapped up with the purchasing and the importing of the old data and as far as my contract went it was completed. The next phase Anna Marie was working on was updating her website to auto work with SalesForce and automatically import from that website so they begin to work together. This task was not handed to me as I do not have that kind of experience with WordPress and did not feel comfortable in a production environment completing that.

Part Three - Conflicts

Honestly there was not major conflict to report with this project at all. Me and Anna Marie worked a few years ago in community theatre and I have known her through my parents for a while. It isn’t surprising that our working environment was actually very relaxed and adjustable for the situation as things came on and went.

Overall we had no conflicts to resolve and the only complaint I would have is just timelines on response sometimes felt like nothing was really happening or I was on standby for responses which took a while to get going.

Conclusion

Overall this project went incredibly well although unable to show a majority of my information about the topic or at least the in depth what it looks like on operating systems and configuration. I am pleased with how the whole project went. There was no issues from day one and after the deployment of the machines and the CRM tools I have had zero support tickets or been informed that something went wrong or isn’t right. I think this is all an amazing feat and that the planning, preparing, and the deployment of it all was a complete success.

With my contract wrapping up I am excited to move onto newer goals and prospects in the future that’s for sure!