Deployment Services for Lync - What Experience Tells Us

Brent Kelly and Marty Parker wrote an excellent piece in UCStrategies this month that included a look at how to model TCO for Lync deployments. One takeaway I hope you got from their insights is that the deployment of Lync is generally complicated. Barb Grothe made this point several times in her blogs about Lync deployment over on No Jitter last summer.

Most everyone agrees that a lot of planning is needed to properly deploy Lync in just about any enterprise.

Microsoft takes a whack at addressing the need for planning by offering eligible customers with Software Assurance a set of vouchers worth up to 15 days of engagement activity through their Lync and Exchange Deployment Planning Services (L&EDPS) program. These vouchers are typically redeemed through Microsoft partners, and probably would cover a series of workshops designed to help you understand Lync and its architecture and to have some initial conversations about your legacy systems as well as perhaps a preliminary sense of what your goals might be in a unified communications deployment.

By the end of the workshops you probably know enough to realize that you cannot do a deployment of Lync effectively and efficiently without external help.

Most of the UCStrategies folks are involved with firms that offer excellent Lync deployment services. And I've had many great conversations with Stephen Tong over at Avanade and with Joe Porter, in what is now the Universal Communications consulting group within Microsoft, about what it takes to deliver an effective Lync deployment planning engagement. Bottom line, every time, is that Lync deployments are complicated and there are no shortcuts. But one thing that is also clear is the direct correlation between experience and positive outcomes.

I had a chance last month to meet with Unify Square CEO Sonu Aggarwal to talk about deployment planning for Lync. His company, located down the street from Microsoft, has worked with a number of global enterprises such as BMW and Unilever to puzzle out the best way to approach large-scale and global deployments of Lync. Unify Square is not unique in this, but they have done it often enough and with enough good results to be able to capture significant knowledge and expertise. Through it all, says Sonu, he has learned that the key to success is careful and informed planning.

One very interesting observation Sonu made is that most people go through the Lync planning process without thinking about the KPIs that are going to be used to assess the unified communications system after it is in production. That is an excellent point, and reflects the kind of focus today senior management has around "close the loop" assessments of projects to ensure that project design, execution, and results met corporate expectations. A very early focus on KPIs also makes it easier to successfully transition the Lync project from the deployment team to the production team without delivering a lot of surprises at the handoff.

Sonu scoffed a bit at the idea that 15 days, as provided by the L&EDPS program, is sufficient to properly prepare for a Lync deployment. Unify Square's deployment planning service (branded as UC Right Track) is a 30-day program that, in effect, structures the road ahead by looking at four key aspects of a Lync deployment: strategy and design, implementation and roll-out, user adoption, and operations. Everyone else probably has this as well, but what impressed me was Sonu's very forward thinking about the importance of the stakeholder KPIs throughout the entire design process.

This hit home for me. I was once involved in a Lync deployment design where we figured the help desk trouble ticketing system could be used for reporting jitter and other call quality issues. Except we didn't appropriately understand how the volume of trouble tickets negatively impacted the scorecard for the IT Support VP. Let's just say that she went out of her way to shut down the second phase of the Lync roll-out. Sonu is entirely correct - KPIs matter. It is something you learn from experience.