Many of term / high pressure shorter missions advisory teams mingle with projects that are in the midst of a death spiral. Council are usually called to attempt a rescue - superhero style - because the use of technology fails to meet expectations. While most of the time, there are amazing things the team can do to work with the rescue, it is often temporary measures to achieve stability so that the project can refocus the fight against fire for build / develop phases.
The key word throughout this paragraph were "expectations" - many projects begin with a set of expectations that clearly are not fully defined and are regularly not measurable. If it is not measurable in some way, by definition, it is impossible to achieve (Well, I guess you could also say that it is impossible to fail!). Citrix Consulting Methodology has been around for centuries and we stick to that for a reason.
A common problem is diving directly from the proof of concept directly into the implementation of a pilot project. In the consulting methodology, proof of concept environments are generally eager implemented with minimum requirements to test whether the overall concept is likely to work. During the POC phase we would enter new requirements and define success criteria, and the search for better planning. These details combine to allow us to create a complete design for the solution that can possibly be taken in the pilot phase. Without step requirement gathering, design is essentially a design boilerplate that ultimately leads to the environment being designed around the technology stack, rather than the functionality expected around.
Setting a clear set of requirements from the start of any project is key to any successful deployment. Too often, I see projects where the requirements are a bit like this:
1) virtualizing the entire desktop area into a single image solution
2) improving time logon
3) No disturbance of the existing environment
4) the work of the capacity
What sounds like a head of copy / very competent pasta reviewed the marketing slides from a recent trade show! Each of these things must be examined, extrapolated and measurable outcomes clearly defined. For example:
1) improve logon time
- Current connection times vary between 0 seconds and 8 minutes
- times of target logon under 60 seconds
- logon time is defined as the time the user logging on to their desktop and
be available for use
so we clearly know what the goal is, and we can design a solution that provides the necessary improvements. For those of you paying attention, you'll notice that I clearly missed the first item in the list to use as an example ... I often see this as a "pilot project" with no clear definition of what is expected, but it is such a huge elephant in the room that everyone ignores carefully in the hope that it goes away! Once we begin to define what might look like a set of details, it might start to look a bit like
1) virtualizing the entire desktop area
- discovery application should be made to define sets of applications and user segments
- application delivery mechanisms based on the application of discovery and user segmentation results, set
- define an implementation strategy that addresses all application sets and user groups
- on the basis of the implementation strategy, define a FlexCast infrastructure capable of providing all different delivery platforms (XenApp, App-V, XenDesktop, RemotePC etc.)
- etc.
the definition of this driver is in the interest of everyone - usually this driver is signaled by a C-level executive and sent from above as a strategic orientation. What happens next defines how the project is likely to go - or solutions teams are a set of assumptions and hope for the best, or they break down into components and attempt to clarify the requirements before proceeding with any stage of the design. It is clear that this will go beyond the scope of this blog, but it is a vast area that needs a discussion with the project sponsors. Without strict clarity around these areas, it is impossible to define criteria other than some very basic "Get the virtualized OS" or "Put Cloud Gateway to provide mobile access." I'll try to answer it in a blog later, but for now feel free to comment on how you have managed to define in your experiences below. I will return again in a later blog
so back to top -. Why projects are found in what appears to be a death spiral, and what do we do once everything is stabilized, we will return to the requirements and ensure that we also get the clear as humanly? possible. once we have clear requirements (and accepted) the perfect next step is to review the design and examine where the weaknesses are compared with that newly clarified expectations. in general, once the dialogue is re-opened, it is not too difficult to recover and improve the project, which we all look like heroes!
The views expressed here are mine alone and was not authorized and do not necessarily reflect the views of Citrix.
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