When "doing things properly" doesn't mean "doing them big"
How I helped a multinational set up its Milan office without wasting budget
A multinational based in London was about to open the doors of its new Milan office. New space, new colleagues, new IT infrastructure from scratch. The London technical team — highly skilled, really — already had a proposed setup in hand. Solid, well structured, technically flawless.
Just one problem: it was designed for a company of 100 people. The Milan office would host 20.
MY ROLE
I joined the project to handle the whole Italian operational side: choosing suppliers, procuring the hardware, configuring the network and the initial setup of the workstations. I worked closely with the professionals in London, who followed the project remotely and made an essential technical contribution.
But there was one thing that they, inevitably, couldn't have: a feel for the Italian market.
THE PROBLEM WITH TECHNOLOGICAL "COPY AND PASTE"
People who work every day with large international corporations think, rightly, on an international scale. The solutions they propose work very well in that context. But applied to a smaller organisation — even a solid, well-structured one like the Milan office — they risk being oversized compared with the real needs.
It's not a criticism.
It's simply the difference between those who look at the global picture and those who know the local ground.
My contribution was to translate: take London's technical guidance, compare it with the real needs of the Milan office and find a suitable setup. Neither too little nor too much.
THE RESULT
The office opened on schedule, with an infrastructure that works, scales as much as it needs to and — no small thing — is in line with the budget actually needed for an office of that size.
The London team appreciated the approach. Sometimes the most useful expertise isn't the most technically advanced, but the kind that can read the context you're working in.
WHAT I LEARNED (OR CONFIRMED)
Every project has its own scale. Copying solutions from one context to another without adapting them isn't efficiency — it's risk. Whether you're setting up a 200-person site or a 20-person office, the right solution is the one designed for you. Not the one designed for someone else.
