The SEC mandate requiring Ernst & Young to transition to the CapGemini brand came as an unexpected and unrealistic deadline. At the time, Ernst & Young was a partnership of several autonomous consultancies worldwide that shared branding and technology. Our seemingly impossible mission was to transition all of the technical consultants' email accounts to the CapGemini system before the end of June - mere months away given the April timeframe.
I organized a meeting at the Ernst & Young headquarters in London, England with all of the partner email administrators and numerous relevant stakeholders to address the transition. Many of the administrators did not speak English as a first language, so translators were provided. I brought in a consensus decision support software tool (no longer in service) to allow for simultaneous parallel input from all participants, orchestrated by myself as the meeting leader.
The result was that each person left with a printed plan for moving forward.
Despite the complicated effort to separate several thousand users, the deadline was met, avoiding large SEC-mandated fines.