The Coronavirus pandemic has affected organisations of all types in different ways, with IT departments especially impacted by the sudden shift to mass remote working.
Steve Capper moved into his current role as Global CIO of professional services firm SNC-Lavelin during the first quarter of 2020, just as the pandemic was about to take hold.
"I joined the company then went out to India, San Francisco, Montreal, then bang, I was back in the house," said Capper. "I didn't go into the office again. But I did manage to go out and see as many people as possible."
He acknowledged the challenges of keeping operations going during the early stages of the pandemic.
"We had 38,000 people at the time. How do you get them all connected and make sure they have [Microsoft] Teams? The single biggest thing we did to help was to get people at home working with video conferencing. People were quite self-sufficient and that really helped.
"But we struggled with our big engineering applications which need quite meaty machines to run them. That was a real struggle because people couldn't go to the office to use them. So we had to do clever things like getting people onto remote desktops, and we implemented VDI [Virtual Desktop Infrastructure] as fast as we could so people could work from anywhere."
Capper also explained how he stamped his own personality and managerial style across his organisation whilst working from home. Watch the video for more.
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