Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast, another great customer perspective. This week we dive deep on RFP processes and Chris at Clifford Chance and their RFP, moving from Cisco PBX to Teams Phone, how they broke the lots down, how they did the research, the whole process. Chris gave us a lot of really great insights.

Many thanks to him for jumping on the pod. And also many thanks to Numonix who are the sponsor of this podcast, really appreciate all their support on with the show. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Always excited to get customer perspectives on the podcast, and this is gonna be a great one from Chris.

Chris joined me on a panel recently and we had a really great conversation, at a Cavell, event. it wasn't recorded, but I said afterwards we've gotta have that conversation and more on the podcast. So, Chris, thanks so much for joining.

Chris Styczynski: Yeah, thank you rest for inviting me, Tom.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So, to, to start us off, can you intro us to yourself and, and your role at Clifford Chance?

Chris Styczynski: Yes, sure. So, I'm Chris and I'm what we call a Service Owner for Unified Communication and Collaboration. It's an IT role, for a law firm, and I'm responsible for all UC and collaboration tools that we use to collaborate internally and externally.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And your remits quite wide, isn't it? Can you take us through?

'cause everybody has the same role, but actually as we found out when we were discussing with other enterprises, the same title has different responsibilities in different orgs.

Chris Styczynski: Yeah, and that's true actually. Whenever. Talk to my colleagues in the other organizations. They seem to have a remit going either way, either less or more.

so my remit is, an email system. it's our telephony system. It's our meeting platform, which is Teams, plus a couple of other small instances of other

platforms. and it it's also our meeting room experience, so video conferencing. in the meeting rooms.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And, and what's your, just to briefly, what's your background and how did you end up in this role?

Chris Styczynski: Okay, so, I've been at Clifford Chance for 12 years now, or 13 years, in April. before that, I was working as a consultant in the UC space, or IP telephony space at, at that time. I spent couple of years working for companies like Cable Wireless Worldwide before we were taken over by Vodafone for a company called KDDI Europe, which is a Japanese integrator, and couple of years at BT Global Services.

So I moved from a consultancy into end user space, and I'm using my experience from the other side to benefit the firm.

Tom Arbuthnot: I was gonna say that that experience has come in particularly handy in the, in recent times, hasn't it, with your RFP process, 'cause you've sat on the other side of the fence. so, and, and that was gonna be kind of the, the bulk of our conversation today.

You've just been through a, a multi lot RFP for moving to, to Teams and Teams phone. so can you just take us through that, and I know you broke it into multiple lots, but maybe you can kind of intro us to where you are today and where you're going.

Chris Styczynski: Yes, sure. So, Clifford Chance, has been quite an on-prem environment for, for many, many years.

now the, there was a change in IT, strategy Cloud first we obviously want to move to the Cloud, reduce the resiliency on, or reliance on the on-prem systems. and as part of that, we decided to move our Teams, telephony. So, We wanted to identify, find a partner, the right partner to help us with it.

so we decided to spend some time doing market research to find the right partner can help us transition, but also a partner who can, support us as a managed services. so we want to be sure that we have, a full end-to-end support from telephony after the meeting room. so we. It started with RFI, we reached out to a large number of different organizations to understand their capabilities and their, desire to be a Clifford Chance partner.

from that pool, we picked up a smaller group of partners, and we started an RFP. And the RFP is where we actually look into the details of the solution we want to have and how we want to that to go forward with us.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And for anybody listening who isn't, so much in our world, RFI is kind of a Request For Information.

So it's like a initial pass of who are you, what you might do, and then RFP is much more you are committing to answering or proposing for this solution.

Chris Styczynski: Yes, that's correct. So what we decided to do is actually we went to three different categories of partners. So we decided to go to big telcos. so they are companies that provide, end-to-end solutions.

we decided to go to multinational integrators. Big companies that are in that space, but they also do a lot more. And then we also went to UK based smaller partners who Microsoft lists as their preferred partners or in the directory. So we wanted to make sure we speak to many different companies before we make a decision.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And just give people a bit of context about the Clifford Chance, kind of your, your coverage and a number of users. It's quite big, isn't it?

Chris Styczynski: It is, for a law firm we are quite big. Obviously if you compare us to some of the financial companies, we are not that big. But for a law firm, we have approximately 8,000 users, across, 20 something countries.

Our head office is in the UK. That's also our biggest office, but we do have a large presence in Americas and in AsiaPac. We also have number of offices in Europe, which are also relatively big, especially our, German. Practice.

Tom Arbuthnot: So this is a global migration and considering all the different infrastructure in those global locations and the telephony carrier migration

Chris Styczynski: Indeed.

And the regulations as well. Yeah, because that's another important aspect of, moving to Cloud telephony, that regulations across different countries, data privacy, but also telecommunication regulations have to be taken to the account. And for that reason, we, we wanted to find a partner who has experience with multi-national migration.

So we don't. Fall into the issues that we don't have countries of later on.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah. There are some meaningful differences in, in, in the Cloud side. It's similar, albeit different regulations, but particularly with telephony connectivity, there are some very specific local considerations and, and local supply availability that can impact you.

Chris Styczynski: Yes, unfortunately, yes.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So you, you, you did the RFI, they did the RFP and you broke it down pretty extensively into six lots. Can you kind of take us through those lots?

Chris Styczynski: yes. So what we wanted to achieve during the RFP is to give ourselves a certain level of flexibility to go with one partner who is very strong in one area, but perhaps the other partner in the other area.

We didn't, we didn't want to force ourselves to go from. For only single partner. So the way we split, the RFP is into six lots. The lot one is all about migrating from the Cisco on-prem telephony to Microsoft Teams telephony. So analyzing our configuration, coming up with the run books, coming up with the training approach, change management approach for all that core telephone migrations.

in the log two, we focused on our switchboard, and the reception number. So every single Clifford Chance office has the main office number, which asks as a main gateway for potential clients calling in Clifford Chance. So we want to have a robust solution for, for that service line.

Tom Arbuthnot: It's interesting to me that you, you broke that up.

That piece of the business is so important. It, it warranted its own lot. That's different to telephony and different to contact center.

Chris Styczynski: Yes, indeed, indeed. Especially that the market in there are a number of different products in that market that we wanted to make sure we understand very, very well. Now, in, in lot three, we focus on the contact center.

Although we are, a law firm, we do have some business operation support, like IT Service Center, but also some of the back office support that relies operates in a contact center fashion. So we wanted to be sure that we select the right product for them for. Day-to-day operation. So that was our contact center load three.

Tom Arbuthnot: And what does

Chris Styczynski: that,

Tom Arbuthnot: what does that look like today, Chris? Is that UCCE or UCCX or some other third party?

Chris Styczynski: Yeah, so it is, a combination of UCCX, because with this telephony, but also, a third party managed, contact center and on-prem contact center, quite an old fashioned system that is kind of standalone, not fully integrated with, with our other systems.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's an interesting space 'cause there's been so much innovation in that space and there's obviously quite a lot native in the Teams box and as you say, quite a wide ecosystem.

Chris Styczynski: Yes, indeed. And that's what we want. We actually want that full integration within Teams for the, for for our users when they reach out to contact center, but also for the contact center agents to benefit from that Integr.

So in, in the lot four, we focused on operator connect or PSTN connectivity. so as I mentioned before, we went out to some of the telco operators and they obviously, they came up with their own solutions. Some of the integrators, proposed the partner solutions in that space. And so we wanted to separate that to make sure we can select the right product for Teams.

in the lot five, we focused on onsite support. We recognized that we were going to have to provide an onsite support for the users, but also for IT Teams. And for that we wanted all of the partners to give us indication of where and how they can support that lot. Six is managed services, so wrap up service that incorporates all of the elements into a single service line where we can, formulate a partnership with a selected, supplier.

So going forward, we have a fully supported systems and something that meets business requirements for operations.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's great. Thanks for laying that out. So clearly it's, it's really interesting because, obviously in my previous life I've been in a lot, a lot of these processes on the, on the receiving side, and, and, and bidding side.

and it's, I think it's a great structure you've got there because you've given yourself the flexibility to say, well, look, this is the, the best operator for

operator cake for our coverage. Like, that's great, but this is the better partner for. Managed service. They've got the right people mm-hmm. On the, on the right tights or whatever it may be.

so you've given yourself a lot of flexibility there to, to pick the best partners.

Chris Styczynski: Mm-hmm. That was the intention.

Tom Arbuthnot: And how did you get from RFI to RFP did you proactively select who you were going to allow to respond to the RFP and then how, like, 'cause it's quite a lot of work on both sides of the fence for, for people filling them in, but also for you guys receiving and assessing them.

Chris Styczynski: Yes, yes. So RFI was very high level, so we didn't want, the partners or suppliers to spend too much time. And also we didn't want us to spend too much time reviewing it. We just wanted to be sure that there is a mutual interest on both sides, that our business model. And our requirements can be fulfilled by the partner, but also that we are an interesting client for the partner.

We found that some of the big providers out there, they, they didn't really consider the Clifford Chance business size as interesting enough for them to bid. Yeah. You,

Tom Arbuthnot: you want to be important to your partner, not unimportant to your partner, don't you?

Chris Styczynski: Indeed, indeed. We don't just don't to be a very small fish in the pond.

Yeah. We just want to be sure we've got partnership, on, on, on different levels. So once we got the response from the RFI, we were clear of, which partners are fit for the RFP, and we reached out to them. and that was a lot more detailed, and the responses that came from the partners were very detailed as well.

so we had to spend a lot of time to analyze them. Obviously, Copilot was very useful for that as well. but if you want to do it. Fully and correctly. You do have to spend all your own time on that as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And, and, and how long did it take you to put the RFP together? Because there's a lot of research internally.

I guess it's, it's your service, so you probably had a lot of the information to hand, but I I That's not inconsiderable amount of work to put that RFP together.

Chris Styczynski: No, so we started in September. last year, to put all the RFP requirements. and we made our decisions couple of weeks ago. So it was a long process.

it was quite degenerative as well. So, apart from the written responses, we asked the partners to come to the. To our office in London and present back to us what they feel is the right solution for us and how they feel they can, Ben, they can deliver that solution. Mm-hmm. The benefit of Clifford Chance.

So that was quite interesting as well, to have those people in the meeting room and question them and, and maybe just discuss openly of what do you feel is the right solution for us.

Tom Arbuthnot: For, you can't beat that opportunity to actually feel out both sides of the table as well. You say like, like, and also RFPs, having filled them in as a, a, a supplier, like sometimes they kind of box you into a certain type of answer, but when you're in the room you can say, well actually, have you considered there's a different alternative here or there's different approaches.

Chris Styczynski: Yeah. I found that as well. We always try to, Capture everything in a, in a questionnaire when, when we send it to suppliers. But some of the suppliers came something better than we haven't really thought about. and that's quite eyeopening as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, no, that's awesome. O of the, of the six lots, which was the kind of, most intense or hardest, would you say?

Chris Styczynski: I believe the last one, the, the, the Managed Services, mainly because we extended that also to our meeting room experience. We wanted our partners or potential partner to help us with managing the meeting rooms across all of our offices in a much better way than we do now. okay. So that

Tom Arbuthnot: wasn't just telephony.

That was telephony and room. So what's your room to state look like?

Chris Styczynski: so, video conferencing is a split between a native Cisco devices and Microsoft Teams Room devices. now all of that is obviously

integrated with different AV products that you might have to fit out the room to make it more, user friendly.

So they are many Crestron devices, XTRONS devices, Sennheisers microphones. So it's obviously multi-vendor platform interconnected to provide the best end user experience. For that reason, we asked the partners to come up with a product and the support structure that would allow us to manage that estate much better than we do now.

Tom Arbuthnot: And you've got some, you manage a team that do some operations and management in-house. What does your, I guess, either current or future model look like in terms of how much you do in-house and how much is this partnership?

Chris Styczynski: yeah, so that hasn't been decided yet. we are in discussion with a selected partner on Statement of Works for the last lot, just to make sure we understand very clearly where we need to provide our resources.

Where the partner is going to do, we expect partnership. With them to make sure that, it's fluid. So it's not always, a, a straight line saying, this is your responsibility, this is my responsibility. We want to be sure that we have a, a, a partner who can help us and perhaps, extend the support where required, but that decision is still ongoing.

Tom Arbuthnot: Okay. Good to know. Yeah, it's interesting to see where people will draw the line on in, in-house versus partnership and how tight that partnership is. Mm-hmm. And on the, on lot four on Operator Connect, I'm interested that you explicitly said Operator Connect, not telephony connectivity. So is that a decision you made going into the process?

Chris Styczynski: yes. the idea is that we want to move away from, managing on-prem devices. and obviously Operator Connect gives you that, flexibility that you can move away and actually do, a lot more in the Cloud. So, although we recognize that the migration will include a step where we are using direct routing and perhaps an on-prem SPCs,

Tom Arbuthnot: mm-hmm.

Chris Styczynski: The direction of travel is to have a fully operated connect solution. So we wanted to be sure that partners take into consideration they transition, but the proposed, but they propose and operate the connect as a, as a end goal.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And did you find, we, we talked about this, we had Andrew at BAE on the, on the panel as well.

Like he had some really tricky countries, country coverage wise. That was okay for you?

Chris Styczynski: No, we do have couple of tricky countries. we do have presence in Middle East. We have presence in China, we have presence in India.

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, okay.

Chris Styczynski: Yeah. Sorry. All of tricky. Recently. Complicated. Yes, yes. not as complicated as our Andrew had, but yes.

we do have couple of countries that perhaps need a bit more planning. and of course there are gaps in that space. We are trying to fill in the gaps using direct routing as a service, where operator connect perhaps is not available.

Tom Arbuthnot: Makes sense. And for the, I'm interested for the switchboard and the contact center.

Mm-hmm. Those are some of the hardest, I think, in the sense of, you obviously have a really good understanding of what Microsoft Teams is. You understand Operator Connect, you understand Teams Rooms. Mm-hmm. Like with those, you are potentially assessing new software solutions and, and new, new software partnerships as well as the, the actual vendor.

Chris Styczynski: Mm-hmm.

Tom Arbuthnot: how was that?

Chris Styczynski: Yeah, so we found that, Majority of the part of the suppliers, they propose the same solution. There were couple of products that perhaps were outside of that remit, but what we caveated in the RFP and in the Statement of Works that we want to run the proof of value of the product before we commit to any contractual agreement.

So the product that was proposed on the paper, it seems like the right fit, but we do want to make sure that, we include our operators and our contact center agents in the evaluation in the POV before we commit.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. That's a really good, yeah, really good tip for people that there's a, a, a, a caveat or a stage gate there where it's like, did the business side actually, agree with this choice and the functionality of the features as well?

Yes, particularly with, I'd say switchboard, that's a killer one because those people who are, you know, fielding those calls at pace, need that, that solution to really work and really be reliable. That's awesome. So taking it up a level, like for this whole process, because lots of people are on this, you know, traditional PBX to Teams journey, what would you say are kind of, some, some hints and tips on going through this process or things you've learned?

Chris Styczynski: Okay, so, I feel you need to understand your users very well. So, before. We went out to the RFP, we spent some time with our users doing business analysis to understand what are the requirements going for telephony forward, and what do they like about the systems now, what would they like to see going forward as well?

Now, a lot changed in the last few years. Telephony has became less important to some of the users, but also requirements changed as well, especially in, AI world and in better collaboration. So make sure you understand. What your users actually want so that you can compliment Microsoft Teams solutions with whatever other products you might have to go for being your switchboard, being your recording, being your AI agents and similar.

So to me, that was an, an important part. And also make sure you select the right partner. now of course we are going to transition now, so I hope we made the right call on the, on the partner, but we spend a lot of time making sure that we. we validated. Is the partner the right choice for Clifford Chance?

Not only because of their skills, but also the culture, the way they work? Yeah. where they're based, how they communicate, how flexible they are. We're talking about a project that might take us 18 months. We can't agree everything now, and be sure that in 18 months it's gonna be still the same. There might be some changes.

Is this partner flexible or would they just follow a cookie cutter approach? So make sure you've got that understood as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's a really good point as well. And, and often the, the bigger the partner, the more, the more rigid they are. I've seen in the past like, well, like we, we said two years ago, this was the project. Like, well, yeah, but like things change.

Chris Styczynski: Yes, yes, yes.

Tom Arbuthnot: Interesting. You mentioned AI as well, like, I guess other comms and communication is so interwoven to the wider business. The, the, the wider businesses. AI and technology platforms are obviously gonna impact choices in comms and communications as well.

Chris Styczynski: Yes, yes. It's all about communicating with clients, communicating internally, externally, and making sure that you. Use the value of your products, not necessarily just to talk to people, but also to capture the important informations and AI, obviously in the legal firm, it's a, it's a hot topic now.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah.

Across the whole vertical. It's amazing. 'cause obviously it's, it's highly impactful and potentially highly beneficial. So, and it's interesting, comms is right at the center of that with things like meeting recaps and insights and putting that data. So, yeah. It's great to hear that you are, you are well aligned on that.

Chris Styczynski: Mm-hmm.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Chris, thanks so much for sharing that. I think that's some really good tips for people in how you've done that. And, hopefully once you're, underway on the project and a little bit, a little bit along, we can have you up again on the pod and we can talk about the, the progress and then then the great success, all being well in, in a few months.

Chris Styczynski: Yeah, I hope so as well. Thank you very much, Tom, for inviting me and I hope I managed to contribute to your podcast in a meaningful way.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, no, it's really great information. Thanks so much, Chris