Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/74024
www.iltanet.org starts with clearly defined goals and a set of objectives that outline what you wish to achieve. Many projects go haywire because of a lack of clarity in the goals or objectives. For example, one part of your team might think that the goal is cost savings, while a second might think it's timeliness of the implementation. If you do not clearly articulate the priorities of the two goals, the second party might focus on timeliness "at all costs," and you might end up with a runaway budget. For the top 100 international law firm, it wasn't sufficient to transition services from one set of carriers to another in order to consolidate billing; it was also critical to achieve carrier and access fault tolerance and diversity, to coincide with a DR strategy. Define roles and responsibilities. Start with defining the stakeholders. In a law firm, this might extend beyond the IT department to include an executive director, a chief administrative officer or the head of a department. Then you must define the role that IT will play, especially with projects that involve other departments or outside vendors. The role of each third-party vendor must also be clearly outlined. This is an area where finger-pointing can become an issue and derail a project or cause unforeseen problems. All parties must understand and sign off on their respective responsibilities to ensure accountability to each other, to the success of the project and ultimately to the stakeholders. In addition, any departments other than IT that are involved in the project must have well-established roles. Establish timelines. The project plan must include timelines and dependencies to which everyone adheres. Any standard or published intervals from outside parties must be well-documented in order to avoid any missed expectations. Don't forget to keep dependencies in mind. 38 ILTA White Paper 2. Build the Road Map When planning your project road map, you must have a clear understanding of your starting point, milestones and final destination. In order to ensure that everyone is on the same page, it is important to have a clear vision of what the current and new environments look like, as well During the WAN deployment, we needed to ensure that all services for the new office location were implemented in a timely manner to coincide with the move. At the same time, services needed to be implemented at the core site, where all the data and applications resided. A manufacturer delay on the hardware was uncovered prior to the project, allowing it to be built into the project plan. This type of timeline due diligence helps avoid delays or, conversely, the delivery and early billing of the carrier services in advance of the customer being able to use them. Define success. A critical part of crossing the finish line is putting together a concise definition of success to which all involved parties can commit. One might construe this step as an unnecessary effort; after all, isn't completing the project on time and within budget sufficiently clear as a definition of success? Unfortunately, it's not that simple. A successful migration not only meant implementing the new solution on time and on budget, it also meant defining the firm's tolerance for downtime and ensuring that planned downtime during the migration window was well within the users' acceptance.