Seamless merger for a UK-based charity

The client

Waythrough, a charity specialising in mental health, alcohol, drugs and related areas, formed in 2024 through the merger of the Richmond Fellowship and Humankind organisations. Waythrough services include drug and alcohol support, supported housing, criminal justice, employment and skills, young people and families, domestic abuse, and social enterprise.

The objective

In December 2023, Humankind and Richmond Fellowship announced their decision to merge to form a new national charity, aiming to better support people facing multiple disadvantages. By leveraging the strengths of each organisation, the new charity would meet more people where they are, and break down the barriers that stop people getting the support they need to live a life they value.

Following the legal merger in June 2024, with Aquarius as a subsidiary, the business requirements were three-fold:

• Rebrand the merged organisation to a new identity by 1st October 2024. This was a merging of partners, not a takeover of one organisation by the other
• Maximise the ability for people across the organisation to collaborate
• Maximise savings and increase efficiency through economies of scale and consolidation of duplicate systems

The approach

Waterstons, Richmond Fellowship’s Managed Services Provider and a PowerSyncPro partner, was engaged to design, lead and help implement the technical side of the migration.

As Richmond Fellowship had a heavily-SaaS based IT service, the core of this effort was the consolidation of two Microsoft 365 tenants into one, through migration of users and services from the Richmond Fellowship into the Humankind tenant.

This was conducted by pre-staging and preparing data and services as far as possible, and performing a “cutover” migration during a maintenance weekend.

Once all users and devices were in a unified environment, the process of rebranding to a new identity would become more straightforward.

Challenges

Whilst any Microsoft 365 tenant migration can be complex, there were some notable additional challenges with this transformation:

• Due to the size of the organisation and nature of the industry and volunteer work in particular, there was a relatively high turnover of user accounts. This presented a challenge in maintaining appropriate target accounts during the migration preparation phase.
• With a distributed workforce of over 1,500 users, typical approaches successful for smaller or localised organisations such as engineers providing in-person support and re-imaging devices would not scale.

The Results

Waterstons used the PowerSyncPro toolkit to significantly improve the end-user migration experience, and reduce administrative effort and cost.

The PowerSyncPro DirSync tool was used to synchronise 1,590 user accounts from the source to the target environment, performing appropriate transformation on properties where required as well as bi-directional password synchronisation. This significantly reduced the burden on the project and support teams for managing changes to accounts during the preparation phase, eliminated the need to communicate new passwords to migrating users, and facilitated backwards-compatibility for migrated users to easily authenticate for certain services remaining in the source environment.

In the client’s words…

“We’ve had lots of positive feedback from across the business. In particular, our programme manager who sees M&A activities day in day out said, “this was the smoothest merger I’ve seen.”

James Staff, Head of IT Operations, Waythrough

The PowerSyncPro Migration Agent was used to automatically transition Windows computers from the source environment to the target environment. 1,054 Windows computers were migrated in the first days following the Microsoft 365 migration, rising to 1,112 computers as staff and volunteers returned from leave or other absence. This was faster, cheaper and logistically easier than a small army of engineers rapidly re-imaging devices, and ensured a good user experience immediately following migration – the vast majority of users were back to work in less than an hour.

Following a kick-off in April 2024 and a subsequent design phase in May, the Microsoft 365 migration was carried out early September, facilitating a rebrand on time the weekend prior to 1st October 2024.

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