Back

Workforce Technology

Implementing your technology infrastructure design effectively

09/23/2021

by Miles Collins

In today’s world, every CIO is tasked with a common objective: enable more value for the business with technology. This means not only supporting business objectives with tools and infrastructure, but doing so in a cost-effective manner.

To accomplish this, IT leaders must understand what the business needs and develop a plan to accomplish it. This is where rubber meets the road when it comes to technology infrastructure design, and there are three distinct phases to accomplishing this objective:

1. Preparing to Design the Infrastructure

Before the technical specs are defined and hardware/software is selected, be sure to walk through these exercises first. This will help ensure the final design has purpose and a positive impact.

Understand Your Customer

With the responsibility of enabling more value for the business, every IT leader must first understand who their customer is and how they serve them with the infrastructure, applications, and tools they provide. The first customer to consider is the external customer, the “real” customer – what do these people need and want from you? The second customer to think about is the business itself and how they rely on technology to do their jobs. Of course, these people want “bigger” and “faster” when it comes to tech, but strategically speaking: what do they need? Understanding the business’ objectives should be your first step when developing a strategy and a future state design to ensure you are enabling any priorities already set forth by leadership.

Consider the User Experience

After understanding the needs of your customer, think about the experience users will have. Consider multiple, diverse end user behaviors such as mobile teams and remote workers. Do these users need VPN access, or are their tools hosted via SaaS? Do they have special needs with regards to the amount or type of data they access daily? Is technology, such as video conferencing, important to them? What kind of interactions do the customers have with your systems and have you simplified the experience? The answers to these kinds of questions will be invaluable to your technology infrastructure design.

Define Performance Expectations

As you collect information from the customer and business with regards to their needs for the design and build, think about post-implementation. Anything that IT maintains or supports should be measured in terms of its effectiveness and value. This means IT leaders need to define the performance expectations of tools and systems in partnership with the business to create accountability. Defining these measurements should be done from the customers’ and the business’ perspective.

Design with the End User in Mind

As the inputs to the infrastructure design process are captured the design itself can begin. This process is iterative as you learn new information and is best tasked to system architects as someone who understands the objectives, requirements, and solutions available on the market. The ‘providing value’ aspect of the CIO’s job is two-fold when selecting the right technologies. First, ensure that you are future proofing your design by selecting tools that are easily integrated and well adopted in the industry. Secondly, do not build something that has costs that outweigh the benefits provided. This means looking at the total cost of ownership compared to the intrinsic value to the business. It also means ensuring the complexity of the systems selected do not outweigh what the organization can support.

2. Planning the Infrastructure Implementation

Once your technology and infrastructure design is nailed down with buy-in from the business, it’s time to plan the implementation. There are five critical elements to being successful with this phase:

Secure a Strong Program Management Team

The first key to success here is having the right people in place to plan and manage the projects. Many organizations have lean PMO’s or project managers that are experts in non-technical projects. Having a team that understands the ins and outs of the infrastructure upgrades, can work seamlessly with the technical teams, and report progress effectively will make all the difference.

“Prior Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance”

It’s true what the military says: Prior Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. This is the time to ask all the questions and get as many answers as possible. Focus on the impactful items like fully documenting the scope, gather requirements, and define the teams or resources required throughout the lifecycle of the project. Be sure to complete any current state assessments you need and develop the high-level timelines. You will also want to start thinking about the supply chain and procurement for the technologies chosen along with vendor capabilities along with many other details that can have large effects on the outcome.

Use Metrics to Measure and Report the Progress from the Start

Third, be sure to capture metrics and the current state of the environment before you begin. Understand how many servers there are, capacity metrics, quantities of network equipment, and so on. You will then want to define what completion looks like for each one of these. Pick a cadence and forum in which you review these metrics and progress with the technical teams involved, your stakeholders, and leadership to provide transparency and generate confidence.

Communicate the Plan and Priority to Everyone Involved

Communicating the plan to every level so each person involved understands their role and importance will go a long way. Encourage your management teams to take the time to explain the plan and importance of the effort to their people – make them your “change champions” and bring them along from the start. Publish the plan and timelines so that anyone can take the time to review and understand.

Review Progress Regularly with Stakeholders

Finally, be intentional about providing regular updates to the business, leadership, and even your own infrastructure teams. The sum of the parts becomes greater than the whole when people feel like they are making a difference.

3. Ensuring the Implementation is Flawless

When it comes time for the dominoes to fall, the “smooth factor” will be dependent on how much effort was put into the prior steps. Many programs and projects run past their expected timeline or over the approved budget because the details were not addressed before implementation, which means that success in this next step relies on success with the previous one.

Managing programs and projects successfully requires experience and expertise. Carefully select vendor partners that will help you prevent the common mistakes and increase your chances of being flawless. Typical problems seen here are inadequately staffing project teams, oversimplifying the steps surrounding the actual implementation, forgetting about change management and organizational impact. When upgrades are taking place to enhance your brand or unleash new capabilities teams across the organization need to be involved. Missing this step can lead to ineffective results, but having the right leaders in place can prevent that.

Teams need vision and priorities to succeed. This means taking the time to communicate well, encouraging your people, and actively trying to prevent burnout. It also means being consistent with your words and actions. A large technology implementation should not be something your teams are working on in their ‘spare time’, but instead their primary focus. If done well, the implementation will be one of the organization’s focuses and priorities.

---