An integrated approach to piloting unified communications

By Andrew Cheel

Over the last 18 months I have been actively working with Siemens Enterprise Communication customers to advise and design a detailed unified communications (UC) pilot to suit their specific requirements and to ensure they achieve a balanced and measured outcome across the organisation. It is often assumed that UC should be rolled out by the IT team alone, when in fact UC integration has to be led from the whole organisation to ensure that maximum benefits are achieved – something we have been helping organisations manage effectively.

It's my experience that once a UC pilot has been sanctioned, the project, in its entirety, is handed over to the internal IT department to be executed as it is primarily a technical deployment. This makes sense to a certain extent as UC can have challenging technical parts, which involve integrating UC into an existing infrastructure. However, there is also a user change management element, which is even more critical to the overall success of the pilot. Understanding and addressing both elements is essential to a successful UC pilot.

From our experience, if IT is given all the responsibility for delivering a UC pilot, the project can quickly descend into a technical puzzle with the user element on hold until the live date - in every case I have witnessed, this approach is too late. In order to achieve a successful UC pilot, you must assign the user change management element to a different department/group, who can work in parallel with the technical stream to bring the two elements together at the point of go live.

Establishing a successful UC pilot

In a recent case I was brought in to assist with a UC pilot in a local authority. The planning process had commenced and a few challenges had emerged that needed addressing. On discussing these challenges with the project lead we identified that at least 78 percent of the pilot UC users came from the IT department or associated support groups, demonstrating that it was very much an IT driven project. Very few of the pilot users came from the business groups that were the intended targets of the productivity enhancing toolset and no change management work had been started to integrate UC. We quickly set about changing this and within days had introduced a full change management programme for the pilot and reduced the IT contingent down to five percent, with the remaining 95 percent made up of the business groups intended to benefit from the UC roll-out.

The next stage was to design a pilot checklist that got the user to test the technology out in the field and align it with their job function and requirements. Each element was scored using a simple but effective weighting metric and a success benchmark score set. To help the process run smoothly we divided the pilot into three phases, each phase lasting two weeks. The original plan was to allocate three months per phase, but we found that users often confined everything to the last two weeks, so it is best to give them just two weeks in the first place.

After eight weeks the local authority had completed the UC pilot and it was deemed an outstanding success. 97 percent of delegates who took part in the pilot completed the feedback on time and their insight into how the new toolset worked in the field and how it could benefit them in the daily duties helped to prioritise the larger deployment plan. This local authority now has 85 percent of its user population working in a UC enabled way and the real business benefits are already starting to be realised in areas of flexible working and user contactability.

What we have learnt from this experience is that organisations and IT departments that are embarking on a UC pilot or thinking about it in the future need to consider assigning the user change management responsibilities to a different group outside of IT to ensure benefits are maximised. This group can focus on who should be included in the pilot, what needs to be included/tested and how it should be measured in terms of business efficiencies and not just technical excellence.

About

Andrew Cheel is the Programme Architect for the UC Ambassador programme at Siemens Enterprise Communications. Having worked with an evolving Unified Communications toolset over the last five years he has a wealth of practical experience on how to motivate users to embrace new technology to change their working habits.