Section 7.5. Summary

7.5. Summary

Mastering the technology does not always mean that it makes it easy to deploy in a live production environment and does not guarantee you have support and buy-in from the business. In this chapter, we reviewed best practices and lessons learned from Callisma's customer engagements. There are many "people" and "process" components that have to be assessed and adjusted in order to enable a successful project. A highly collaborative team with a well-established and documented plan is essential to achieving a high ratio of servers consolidated. As documented in this chapter, the following list provides a summary of project enablers that can be leveraged to help make your project a success:

• Develop a business case

• Perform financial analysis

• Establish teams and define roles

• Assess resource requirements and address resource constraints

• Enable capacity planning for all phases of the project

• Utilize forums to establish a coalition, including a weekly status meeting, an application owner forum, and technology briefings

• Conduct structured interviews and develop questionnaires

• Create a centralized repository

• Create a project Web site

• Assess technical and operational gaps

• Manage variance in project support

• Establish a server consolidation/tracking database