Who is Leading Your UC Implementations?
Who is Leading Your UC Implementations? by Kevin Kieller
At UCStrategies, we spend a significant amount of time and many words explaining and debating the relative merits of various technologies: SIP versus PRIs, VoIP versus TDM, UC versus “plain” voice, UM versus voice mail, social versus non-social, etc.
Last year I spent several thousand words on No Jitter describing my approach to selecting the right solution: The Goldilocks Approach. However, once you select a solution, the implementation must be well led in order for the overall project to be a success. This compels me to ask, who is leading your unified communication projects?
I spend half of my time helping organizations select the right solution. I then often get invited (drafted?) to oversee the implementation of the selected solution. This means I spend the other half of my time leading the implementation of solution teams. Being involved in both the strategy development and the implementation, affords me an excellent opportunity to validate the solution selection process and to develop insight on project leadership styles that drive successful UC implementations.
Notice that I have written “project leadership” versus “project management.” This is intentional and is one of the key differences I have observed between successful and troubled implementations.
According to Wikipedia, project management is “the discipline of planning, organizing, securing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals.” A true project manager should “lead” projects however in practice often the project manager becomes more of “project administrator” simply reporting progress week over week: this task is 42% complete, this task is 23% done, etc. Often project administrators have no understanding of the specific task and have no ability to understand if a task truly is complete, even when it is marked as 100% complete in Microsoft Project.
When the person directing a UC project is acting solely as a project administrator, even if their title is “project manager,” there are often problems. When an obstacle arises, project administrators often get “stuck” unable to gather, understand and present the necessary information in order to make a decision or to allow the steering committee to make a decision. The result is often significant delays or key decisions being made by purely technical staff without regard for the overall project objectives.
UC projects are complex. They are complex technically and often politically. To be successful, UC projects need a strong leader who is willing to gather facts, understand trade-offs and make decisions.
For systems integrators this means as you scale up the number of technical resources and as you work to keep your technical resources familiar with the latest software versions and products, also take the time to scale up your project management bench strength and capabilities. Evaluate whether your current project managers are simply administering as opposed to leading.
For vendors this means as you offer technical documentation and technical training related to your solution, you may want to consider also offering more documentation and training that assists true project managers to lead implementations of your solutions.
For organizations, consider who is playing the role of project manager on your next UC project. Whether the project manager is an internal resource or an external one provided by your reseller or systems integrator, the person is in a leadership role and needs to be a leader.
“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” -- John C. Maxwell