How Do You Design a Successful Video Collaboration Environment?

[Kimberly Kelley (kimberly)]

Polycom recently completed a series of four design clinics which you can now watch on-demand to benefit from best practice approaches to:

• Designing your collaboration environment
• Ensuring your data network is ready for voice and video
• Implementing winning workflow strategies
• Measuring and driving performance and utilization

In the first webinar, Arnaud Le Devehat, Director of Portfolio Management, Advanced Services, shares his thoughts on the key success factors for designing a collaboration environment, including how to accurately assess your needs, ensure an optimum solution design, and make best use of available tools.

What business objective are you trying to achieve?

Do you want to use video to improve your customer support operations and/or client relationships? Do you need to attract employees who prefer to work from home? Do you want to make it easier for senior executives to interact with each other and/or their teams? Will you be using video as a way to meet more customers every day? Do you simply want to reduce your travel costs?

Whatever the business case, the starting point for your solution should always be your user stories and personas:

• Personas capture the profiles and experiences of the people who will use the collaboration solution and what they want it to help them achieve.
• User stories help you create video-enabled workflows for each of these personas, in terms of how they’ll collaborate before a meeting (calendar, IM etc.), when joining the meeting (via dial-in, NFC/QR code, URL, concierge etc.), during the meeting (voice, content, video, control etc.) and after the meeting (e.g. replay, share, measure).

Only when you’ve identified and detailed these user stories should you start thinking about the technology needed to support them.

Designing an optimum solution

The success of your collaboration environment depends on a combination of process, culture and technology. To ensure each is properly considered, Arnaud recommends starting with an envisioning phase, before design and deployment.

• Envisioning is about converting your user stories into a high level architecture that supports those stories, and which you can use to plan the investment and outcomes for the project. It’s about capturing the present and planning for the future: talking to your users and IT colleagues about your use cases, reviewing your current architecture, examining CDR (call detail record) data, and using tools such as RealAccess Analytics to help you make educated decisions. You can then use this information to build your desired use cases and user stories, plan IT operations, define best practices, design your high level architecture, and establish planning and budget milestones to optimally design, deploy and operate your solution.
• In the solution design phase, you can translate your high level architecture into a detailed configuration and test validation plan for all products required for your environment, to expedite deployment and accelerate ROI.
• During deployment, you then implement the solution, validate that it meets your user stories, and initiate best practices to drive adoption and utilization.

You can manage each of these phases either internally, or with help from a partner, Polycom Sales or Polycom Global Services.

To summarize:

• Embrace a vision. Put user experiences first, and define simple video-enabled business workflows.
• Design the optimum solution to bring your vision to life - including pre-deployment configuration and validation.
• Deploy analytical tools early - to help you make better decisions, faster and sooner.

To learn the details of Arnaud’s best practices for design success, watch the webinar now.