Insights - Transitioning Political Appointees

Transitioning Political Appointees While Impacted by a National Security Event

January is always busy, but this year the presidential transition brought extra considerations. One of our customers (large Federal department) had about 140 outgoing political appointees and an unknown number of incoming appointees. Then the events of January 6th at the Capitol occurred.

On Tuesday, January 12th, the NuAxis and customer management teams decided to move part of our team offsite to continue equipment preparation and shipment to the incoming staff.

We planned to move to the NuAxis Headquarters (HQ) office located in Tysons, VA. That evening, a small team of essential staff packed up all of the laptops, equipment, peripherals, shipping materials, and supplies to take home. Two of our team members drove additional equipment and supplies to NuAxis. The next morning, all reported to NuAxis HQ. Since the office had mostly been vacant since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the perfect location to continue our preparation for the outgoing and incoming appointees.

Meanwhile at the customer headquarter location, one lead technician manned the offboarding activities while six technicians kept operations moving forward. DC gradually began closing streets around the location on January 13th, and the building closed that Friday afternoon.

Our regional teams quickly pivoted and stepped in to absorb the redirected tickets for all other equipment shipping and retrieval from departing staff across all of the department. Over the week, the entire NuAxis team stepped up to assist with onboarding calls for the new staff and administration, ensuring that everyone was ready to work at 12:01 PM on January 20th.

Ultimately, we relocated 120 laptops and tablets with different images and configurations along with all the necessary peripherals to supply new staff. In three days, we checked and updated 27 laptops, prepared the shipping packages, created UPS shipping labels, and delivered all to be shipped by 6:30 Friday night. By the end of the next week, we had completed quality checks and updates on all the other laptops so that we could start the provisioning of the next wave of appointees. In addition, we sent out two more short notice onboardings in time to have the laptops in their hands on their first day.

On January 22nd, we reloaded all equipment and supplies into our cars and cleaned up the spaces we had been using. Everything was returned to customer site on Monday morning, and the next wave of provisioning both new political appointees and new staff resumed smoothly. Throughout this process, only a handful of our end customers had any idea that anything was going on as the call center, regional technicians, leads, and managers kept everything ticking along smoothly. In addition, the incoming VIPs were full of praise for the team and the process. A Director commented that “it was so nice to be able to track the status of my request in real time in just the right level of detail. It felt like I was tracking a delivery from Amazon.”