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Digitisation without downtime: sequencing a multi-office rollout

Rolling out capture to six offices at once is how projects stall. A sequenced rollout gets you a working reference site and a trained internal advocate.

Written by
Tomasz Novak
Solutions Engineer, Datacoll8
Published
Reading time
5 minutes

A firm with six offices usually wants all six live in the same quarter. It is an understandable instinct and it reliably produces the same outcome: six half-configured sites, one overloaded support queue, and a project that is described internally as not quite working.

Pick a first site for what it teaches you

The first office should not be the largest or the loudest. It should be the one with representative documents, a records lead who will engage, and enough volume to expose real problems within a fortnight. You are buying information, not coverage.

Stabilise inbound before touching the archive

Daily post is the workload that never pauses, so it is the workload that proves the pipeline. Get it flowing cleanly for two weeks, watch the exception queue, tune the thresholds, and only then start on the store room. Backfile is patient. Today is not.

Sequence the rest around the reference site

  • Site one: full configuration, tuning and training, treated as the reference build
  • Sites two and three: cloned configuration, with local exceptions documented rather than improvised
  • Remaining sites: rolled out in pairs, with a trained user from an earlier site present at go-live
  • Backfile programmes started only after inbound is stable at each site

The compounding benefit is people. By the third site, the person answering the operators is a colleague who did it last month, not a consultant on a call. That is what makes the last two offices straightforward, and it only happens if you refuse to run them all in parallel.

Written byTomasz NovakSolutions Engineer, Datacoll8

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