Three Planning Tips to Deploy Business Process Change Using Unified Communications

If you have been following the rapid changes in the communications industry from M&A activities, new Unified Communications solutions, VoIP, Open source, Hosted vs. Premise solutions, Security, Business Continuity and Real-time Business Communication … then, you may be overwhelmed about how to execute a communications purchase and deployment.

Recently I explored how to help customers’ better frame three crucial planning considerations to select a UC solution. First, let’s start with the definition of UC provided by UCstrategies.com – “communications integrated to improve business processes.”

It is Critical to Define the business context for the decision.

Which best describes a macro business reason for your decision:

Level 1) Survival: Current business processes are not addressing competitive threats in areas such as customer satisfaction, sales responsiveness, customer loyalty, retention or a shareholder expectation.

Level 2) Competitiveness: Actions that will significantly differentiate the ability to provide market advantages that result in advances of products and services, market strategy, delivery, and technology which streamlines processes and provides or extends our market reach.

Level 3) Leap Ahead: Planning a leap forward may be of higher-risk, but can provide a significant shift in the nature of the business or the organization or create a whole new thrust for the business. Drivers may be merging trends like GREEN or globalization; or alternatively through mergers, new business model innovations, pay for service, or micro payments.

Focus your leadership’s energy and resources on the desired context for improving your business processes across your organization.

The second planning activity is to define what crucial business goals and measurements will define the initiative.

Step 1) Gather the leadership team and in a few short phrases or sentences, list the measurements required to meet market demands and then, specify the key business process shifts required to achieve the goals. Step 2) Prioritize the list by profitability and difficulty. Step 3) Add a timeline. Sounds easy as 1-2-3. Not really, taking ownership of the business challenges and breaking barriers requires discipline, accountability and the hard work required to effectively execute. Step 4) Compile the list and have the leadership team deploy it to the next layer of associates. Changing business processes requires efforts beyond silos, so assign constituents to work across boundaries. Step 5) Communicate the defined measurements to all the associates and obtain their input to gather additional information on what shifts/changes are required. The result is a two-fold company directive to the communication project team (CPT): 1) Crucial Business Processes Shifts Inventory and 2) Measurements and Priorities for Implementing a Solution. Using your new business plan, start the business process optimization planning.

It’s difficult to put all the planning needs into a short story. Your (CPT) may work with a consultant to accelerate the communication planning process, speeding up the process of assessing barriers and roadblocks, while maximizing and staging action for getting the financial and non-financial business results. The role of the CPT and consultant is to help you sift through solutions, identify barriers, find solutions, provide return on investments analysis, evaluate the total cost of ownership options and ensure that you meet your expectations and results on-time. www.encomm.org is a resource for learning more.

Conduct an internal communication assessment. As we discussed, the purpose of the project is to achieve measured business benefits and profitability.

Evaluate the gaps between your current communication solution and the needed business process changes. Engage industry experts to help you evaluate the plan by business unit and by financial and non-financial benefits. Step through each of the following areas to start:

a) Business Applications: Evaluate communications solutions to achieve crucial business process changes verses the current deployment. How can mobility, video, customer service tools, collaboration, instant messaging, rich presence solutions, faxing and interoperability with existing databases help shift business processes to improve the speed and quality of your operations, reduce cost, increase retention, drive direct or indirect revenue, provide a strategic benefit or productivity enhancements? Ask your advisors to quantify results and be sure to ask how applications may work in differing environments.

b) Infrastructure: What level of interoperability is required to leverage current investment in infrastructure? Is hosted or premise-based required or both? Do we meet compliance requirements and is the environment secure? Can SIP-based strategies be deployed to meet new crucial business process changes and is VoIP deployed or required?

c) Network Connectivity/ Business continuity/Disaster recovery: does current network deployment include: PSTN, VoIP, Frame or ATM and is there a better way with MPLS or SIP Trunking? What is the interstate and intrastate usage? How do we integrate the LAN/WAN today? Determine your bandwidth needs. Even SMBs can deploy Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery plans with VoIP.

Making a purchase decision can be intense, but remember there are resources to help you make a good decision without getting discouraged or missing a business opportunity or goal. Remember the adage, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” IT

Jeanne Leckie is Managing Director of The Leckie Group, Inc., a business consulting firm located in Scottsdale, Arizona. Contact her at [email protected]

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