At the beginning of the planning phase, you must summarize the customer's business, techinical expectations, requirements, and future growth plans to accommodate the increasing demands of the customer in terms of supporting additional IP phones, supporting new features, or adding more applications.
Table B-1 provides the questions that you should ask a customer to get an overview of the customer's company.
No. | Question | Answer |
|---|---|---|
1 | What is the customer name? | |
2 | Briefly describe the customer's business. | |
3 | Provide a brief overview of the services and applications that the customer is running on the network. | |
4 | Identify whether the deployment is a "green field" (new network) opportunity. If it is not, give a brief overview of the current network. |
What is the company's proposed goals and expected growth in the next 3 to 5 years?
What is the company's 3- to 5-year plan for both voice (telephony) and data networks?
What are the company's upper management expectations and requirements for the completed solution, including service levels, features, and functionalities?
What are the company's upper management expectations and requirements regarding the project (timelines, priority deployment sites, success criteria, cost expectations, and so forth)?
The objective of this section is to collect answers to the following questions:
What expectations does the customer have for the deployment of the IPT solution?
What timeline does the customer have for the deployment of the IPT solution?
Should you give any sites, departments, or users priority for deployment?
Use Table B-2 to provide the timeline and description of various phases.
Target | Start Date | End Date | Brief Description of the Phase |
|---|---|---|---|
Successful rollout of IPT for entire organization | Marks the complete IPT rollout in the entire organization | ||
Phase 1 | Includes IPT rollout at Headquarters | ||
Phase 2 | Includes IPT rollout at branch sites | ||
Phase 3 | Deploy additional IPT applications | ||
Add additional phases as needed |
Typically, large-scale deployments divide the complete IPT deployment into smaller phases. For example, Phase 1 might be to roll out IPT to a group of users who are located at Headquarters, Phase 2 might be to roll out IPT at some branch sites, Phase 3 might be to deploy additional IPT applications, and so forth. You need to expand Table B-2 and clearly specify how you want to prioritize the deployment to achieve your final goal of converting your customer's network to end-to-end IPT.
What are the company's upper management expectations regarding the new solution's return on investment (RoI)?