Pepperdine University is committed to the highest standards of academic excellence. With its renowned Malibu campus, facilities throughout California and in Washington, D.C., and international campuses in South America, Europe, and Asia, the university enrolls approximately 8,000 in its undergraduate college and four graduate schools of law, business and management, education and psychology, and public policy.
It’s the idea that all of your files have a place in the cloud, and you can access them from your phone, laptop, or any computer. That’s been hugely impactful in getting more people interested in using Google Workspace.
Jordan Lott, Manager of IT Training, Pepperdine University
Pepperdine’s mission—to prepare students for lives of purpose, service, and leadership—informs every department and function, including IT.
“We take that call to action very seriously,” says Jordan Lott, Pepperdine’s Manager of IT Training. “And it goes beyond the basics, ensuring that the network is stable and that technology works. We want to go several steps beyond so that everyone is using technology as effectively as they can, in a way that improves the classroom and business experience.”
However, the campus’s productivity tools—including email, file storage, and conferencing systems—were not meeting the IT team’s high standards. In particular, their prior email system used by faculty, staff, and students was “nickel and diming everyone’s time,” explains Scott Bolan, Pepperdine’s Senior Director of Enterprise Information Systems.
Other Pepperdine systems, like its clunky video conferencing technology, got in the way of work, and because it was only available in conference rooms, access was limited to a small group of faculty and staff.
As the IT team pondered options, they agreed that switching to a new email would require a lot of preparation for a smooth transition. “We take change management very seriously,” Lott says. “We have to do our part to make sure we roll out tools properly and that we are providing avenues for people to tell us what support they need.”
In early focus groups and town halls with faculty and staff, the IT team focused the conversation on email, since that was one of the university community’s biggest pain points.
“They told us they wanted to access email on their phones as easily as they did on their computers. They reinforced the direction we were heading, which was Google Workspace,” Lott says.
Jordan Lott, Manager of IT Training, Pepperdine University
Once Pepperdine’s IT team settled on Google Workspace to replace Outlook, change management plans kicked into gear over a six-month period before Gmail’s go-live date.
Training sessions. Lott told users that, considering how much time they’d been losing to email deletion and archiving, attending just one hour of training could help them win back several hours a month in lost time. “We had hundreds of training opportunities in the weeks surrounding the Gmail rollout,” Lott says. “We set up a Google Calendar with all the appointment slots and let people know about them.”
“All Questions Answered” Town Hall sessions. “The idea,” Bolan says, “was that we’d put one or two IT people in the front of the room, with the idea that people could ask us anything they wanted about Gmail and Google Workspace.”
The “Deciders.” This group was drawn from every Pepperdine IT department involved in the switch to Gmail, and addressed any issues. “We told people that we’d be meeting once a month, and that we’d be making decisions,” Bolan says. “If you were in that meeting, you got a vote—if you didn’t come to the meeting, you didn’t get a vote.” As the name indicates, the group’s mission was to keep critical issues from becoming roadblocks to the rollout.
White glove migration for early adopters. For high-level users like university vice presidents, the IT team created a hands-on “white glove” transition to Gmail just before the wider rollout. “They’d realize the migration was not that big of a deal, and the message would trickle down to their teams,” says Bolan.
Clear expectations and a narrow focus. “We tried to stay completely focused on Gmail and Calendar, so as not to overwhelm the community,” Lott says, “and so that people could manage the significant change that was happening.”
The go-live walk-around—with doughnuts. The day Gmail went live, the entire IT team wandered department halls to troubleshoot user issues. “We had everyone assigned to a floor or department,” Bolan says. “We brought in 1,100 doughnuts, with the idea that if someone was having trouble with email and was frustrated, at least they’d have a doughnut.”
Thanks to the groundwork done by the IT team, the switch to Google Workspace was relatively painless. “The feedback we got from users was overwhelmingly positive– I think they were ready for the change,” says Lott. Three years after go-live, the trainings continue as a way to help newcomers, as well as some late adopters from the previous email system, start using Google Workspace and Gmail effectively.
“Even three years post-switch, I occasionally have people holding onto Outlook,” Lott adds. “It’s always a win when, after a training class, one of those people says to me, ‘I think I might try Gmail.’” Once users realize they don’t need to go through the time-intensive process of deleting emails—and discover that old emails can be searched for and found in just a few seconds—they’re glad they switched, Lott says.
The thorough change management process also surfaced issues that, when addressed by IT, helped speed up adoption. For example, Lott didn’t realize that many staff and faculty members relied on Outlook’s mail-merge feature to send bulk messages. Before the Gmail rollout, he found an add-on tool for Google Workspace that performed the same function. “The only reason we were able to do that, and easily transition people from one tool to another, was because of that extra groundwork we set up to get feedback from users,” Lott says.
The IT team expected that Gmail would free people from the headaches of the prior system. What they didn’t expect was that other Google Workspace tools, like Google Meet, would have just as great an impact on how faculty and staff worked. Before Google Workspace, working and meeting remotely wasn’t practical for faculty and staff, since video conferencing hardware was limited. Now that Google Meet is available to every user, working remotely is part of everyday life at Pepperdine.
Most Pepperdine students study abroad at some point and need to be able to coordinate with professors and staff on the home campus. “With Google Meet, it makes it much easier for faculty and staff to provide the same level of service to our students studying abroad,” Bolan says.
Faculty and staff are also discovering the quality-of-life benefits that remote meetings can provide. “Anyone can easily jump into a Meet from home or a remote campus, and that gives them back time for their families, their children, and their health,” Bolan says. Meet and all the Google Workspace tools help the campus stay up and running in case of weather or natural disasters, such as seasonal wildfires in and around Malibu. “It means we have redundancy, because email, files, and meetings are all in the cloud,” Bolan adds.
Just as faculty, staff, and students now rely on Gmail and Google Meet every day, they’re now discovering how Google Drive also helps them work flexibly and remotely. “Drive takes away that physical dependency on having just one computer,” Lott says. “We saw that last year with the wildfires in Malibu, people realized that they didn’t have to worry about not having access to their primary computer, because they could work from any device.”
Since the earliest days of Google Workspace’s adoption, Pepperdine’s IT team has worked to spread the message that working in the cloud with Google Workspace is much more suited to the active lives of faculty, staff, and students.
“We’re always reinforcing what we initially said about Gmail, and now what we say about everything from Calendar to Drive,” Lott says. “It’s the idea that all of your files have a place in the cloud, and you can access them from your phone, laptop, or any computer. That’s been hugely impactful in getting more people interested in using Google Workspace.”
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