|
An Assessment is a comparison between a current state and some other or future state. This other state could be a new high level infrastructure design that takes into consideration business and technical requirements unique to your business and requirements. Or, it could be an Assessment against best practices for a particular technical area, like network infrastructure or security. This effort would be analogous to benchmarking. Sometimes Assessments are used to compare a company’s current state to an “industry leading” competitor. There may be a need to know how your company compares to others with respect to networking infrastructures or security policies, for example, or against others in the same vertical market, say retail or utilities. A critical element within the Assessment process is to assure that you have identified an Assessment Sponsor who has 1.) financial and/or functional responsibility, 2.) can act as the key point of accountability during the Assessment and 3.) will be able to assure that the output from the Assessment will be acted-on by the organization. An Assessment is generally composed of three actions: examination, evaluation and recommendation.
Examination
The Assessment Sponsor identifies the project specific requirements and the initial business and technical requirements. It is important to understand the project’s requirements prior to spending too much time determining business and technical requirements. Project specific requirements and constraints will dictate the business and technical requirements that should be gathered and analyzed.
In the optimal Assessment project, project requirements are known, the business stakeholders can articulate their needs, all technical requirements are documented, the future state is understood, team members are available and there is adequate time to complete the project. In reality, often times the infrastructure may not be documented, the way the project’s requirements are provided may constrain business requirements gathering, the future or comparison state may not be fully defined, and there are typically time and resource restrictions. In this case, the Assessment Sponsor should seek assistance and guidance from the Assessment Consultant to determine the boundaries of the project. The Assessment Consultant can help the Assessment Sponsor to document the needs, make suggestions that may help resolve ambiguities and propose steps to meet the project’s goals. AT&T Consulting uses an Engagement Definition Agreement (EDA) to document this information. The EDA is an agreement between the Assessment Sponsor and the AT&T Consultant for details that were not addressed in the Statement of Work (SOW). The consultant you have chosen should provide this type of document to the sponsor and request formal concurrence. This may be repeated if during the engagement new requirements or business challenges are discovered.
Business requirements generally take on three forms: revenue generating, business supporting and infrastructure supporting. Revenue generating requirements could include secure business-to-business communications or wireless hot spot implementation. Business supporting requirements could include new building wireless network design, application acceleration and secure remote access. Infrastructure supporting requirements may include a new out-of-band management network or rogue wireless access point detection.
Technical requirements take on four basic forms: match the current installation, meet a new standard, address a stakeholder’s desire or may be a direct outcome of a previously stated business requirement. In general, technical requirements are easier to determine and document than business requirements. An example of a current installation requirement may be using only presently installed vendors. Examples of new standards may be merger-related IP address standards or product end of life. Often business and sponsor preferences can define a technical requirement. Lastly, a business requirement can indirectly create a technical requirement, such as a contractual agreement between businesses that dictates specific technologies or carriers.
Evaluation
The primary activity of the assessment phase is the identification and documentation of the gap between the current environment and the future state, as defined by the project, business and technical requirements. The consultant will determine the current state via stakeholder interviews, documentation analysis and from data collected through automated tools. The future, or other state, is determined via the SOW received from the consultant and during the requirements gathering phase. This should be defined in a document, such as the previously mentioned AT&T Consulting EDA.
Technical requirements can and should, be gathered simultaneously with the current state information during the stakeholder interviews. This reduces the number of interviews and allows for a quicker project completion.
|
