Sorry for the delay in posting this last part, but vacation took priority.  To finish the series out, I want to provide you with a short list of things not to do.  These are the things I’ve seen customers not do properly that eventually come back to haunt us and make us all look bad (IT staff and consultant).  Obviously, anything that would be opposite of any items above would fit here as well.

1. Don’t pay for a consultant to come in, then stick him in a room and say “come on out when you’re done.”  There’s no way he can understand your objectives or the special quirks your organization has.  This approach reduces the valuable knowledge transfer and experience you could gain by doing the work yourself while the consultant guides you through the process.
2. Make sure your house is in order first.  If your infrastructure is not prepared, don’t rush the project in.  Manny of these items have gone into my pre-engagement checklist.
3. Nothing in IT is perfect, so don’t expect VDI to be.  As much as we depend on computers these days, we should all realize by now that they don’t always work as we plan them to.  Be prepared for this and don’t blame anyone for it.  Work through it together.  Collaboration is key, because one person does not always have every answer.
4. Cutting corners saves money, but cutting the wrong corners too deep will destabilize the building.  Work with your partner to determine when, where and how much the quote can be cut back.

Many of the items in all three parts rely on you trusting your partner, which is why I put that at the very beginning.  Go back and read each of my recommendations and you’ll realize that most of them involve trusting your partner to some extent.  You may have a lot of expertise with virtualization and desktop management, but in this case 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 2.

Hopefully my role as a consultant doesn’t make you instantly dismiss my recommendations.  I have only spent the last two years as a consultant, so I can still put myself into the mindset of a customer.  While I was a customer, we did a mix of learning on our own and relying on consultants for many different non-VDI projects.  While most projects were successful, I always felt the ones that were the most successful were the ones where we had a trustworthy advisor.

VDI really is a paradigm shift and will require you to think in different ways.  That’s not to say you or any of the customers I’ve worked with couldn’t do it on their own, after all, I and every other VDI pioneer had to figure it out somehow.  The advantage a seasoned consultant can bring is experience, which manifests as quicker, more decisive success for you.

In part one of this three part series, I covered the first five items I have found to help make VDI deployments successful.  Now let’s cover the final four items:

1. Plan for future growth.  Don’t spend all the money up front.  Design the infrastructure for growth and budget for cyclical upgrades.  Perhaps you skimp on the storage during the pilot, but set aside money in subsequent quarters for additional drives/shelves.  Leave room for additional RAM in the hosts and set aside money to purchase that RAM later.  You will never know for sure where all the bottlenecks are during the design phase, so having a quarterly upgrade budget will allow for easier resolution of unexpected bottlenecks.
2. Don’t expect the solution to be perfect on day one.  Of course we will all strive for it, but prepare for a rocky road to start out with.  Hope for the best, but expect the worst.  How will you handle grumpy accountants?  What is the best approach for the doctors who don’t feel like they need to comply?  Do you plan to teach the customer service representatives all about their new environment before you even turn it over to them?  Secondarily, budget or prepay for your consultant to come back on site during or after the launch.  This way you can have your (hopefully trusted) consultant available to help with any odd issues that may pop up.  My sales team will often pitch a block of hours to our customers during the presales phase for this specific purpose.  If all goes well, our customers can use this prepaid time to do a six month review of the implementation, help design the next phase, clean up group policy, or help with something else totally unrelated to the VDI environment.
3. Manage your users as closely as you manage your infrastructure.  Train them ahead of time on any changes they’ll need to endure.  Be ready to have technical feet on the floors when they go live on the new system and make sure those feet carry a smile along with them.  Try and utilize superusers in each department to augment the technical staff.  These people will best understand the intersection of business process and technical infrastructure and will be more trusted by the end users.
4. Ask your consultant ahead of time what you can do to prepare your current environment to make the implementation go smoothly.  If you can predefine all the IPs you need before hand, you’ll save valuable time that will greatly benefit everyone later.  I have a document I have developed over the last couple of years that details out exactly what will need to be done to their existing environment so I don’t have to deal with it when I get on site.  I simply make sure the document gets into their hands a week before the project starts and we can start right away with installing the VDI components.

In the final post of this series, I’ll cover a few things I’ve found that can severely harm a VDI project.

I have recently wrapped up my most successful View deployment yet.  As I look back on the project and reflect on its success, I found this blog post writing itself.  In fact, it wrote itself so well, I plan on breaking it up into three different parts.  

Here are the first five items I have found to be critical success factors I in this and several other projects I consider successful:

1. Trust your consultants.  Keep them on board and informed through the entire process.  Make sure they understand both IT’s goals and the business’s goals.
2. Deliver a complete infrastructure.  It doesn’t have to be completely greenfield, but it should be well planned and completely integrated.  Duct tape should not be taken out of the toolbox for this project.
3. Run a complete and thorough proof of concept and pilot.  Nothing beats running the proposed infrastructure for real.  You might find it won’t work and have to throw away all the time and money, but that’s better than building the entire environment and have to make it work due to the size of the investment.  This also helps you to see around all the vendor half-truths and smokescreens and get a true appreciation of the capabilities of each of the products in the solution.
4. Don’t mold VDI into your current processes, take a fresh approach to both and design and deliver them as a single package. This includes both business and IT processes.  If you can, introduce it along with another major process disrupter.  If you’re introducing a new CRM package that completely changes the way the organization will manage its data, introduce your new VDI processes at the same time.  One is bound to fail if you try to retrain your users twice, so why not completely turn them upside down and only train them once?
5. Completely understand your infrastructure.  A consultant may have designed and built most of your solution, but you need to support it.  Learn all you can from the consultant while you can.  Attach to their hip and don’t allow yourself to be distracted.  Ask where the weak spots are and where the bottlenecks will be.  If you develop a good rapport with the engineer, you’ll learn stuff that the pre-sales team won’t give up easily.  This will lead us into the next tip, but you’ll have to wait for the next post.

Part 2 >>