ZNDP 015 – How you can identify your requirements?

Consultative Leadership, Network Design, Podcast, ZNDP

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Hey Ziglets, welcome back!!  It feels like its been forever.  For today’s episode of the Zigbits Network Design Podcast, we are going to answer the question “How you can identify your requirements?”.  Before we jump into that, we have some updates.  Lets get started!

The overall Theme!

Over the last two months or so, we have been focusing on a theme for each of our ZNDP episodes.  We still have a number of topics to cover but here is a quick review of some of the previous episodes that have a direct correlation to today’s topic at hand.

ZNDP 011 – Network Design…But Why?

ZNDP 012 – Evolving your Design Mindset

ZNDP 013 – Business Benefits and Business Outcomes

ZNDP 014 – What is Best Practice?

Requirements?!

How do you identify your requirements? Let’s break this down into different categories of requirements

  • Business
  • Application
  • Technical
  • User

Now let’s talk about explicit requirements vs implicit requirements.  What does this mean?

  • Explicit:
    • Customers, business leaders will be forth coming with the requirements that that know and understand which would be the explicit requirements.
    • The requirements are stated plainly
    • These are relatively easy to determine
  • Implicit
    • There are also implicit requirements that you as a Trusted Advisor should be looking to find out.
    • Have to be determined based on what you are hearing
    • This will take some experience and practice
    • These requirements are normally harder to determine

How do you find this out you ask???  By asking a number of leading questions

What to ask and why to ask it

These are just a few examples, there are a number of questions that with practice you will learn and rely on.

Business requirement questions:

  • What are the key drivers for IT in your business?
  • What’s your expected growth of the business over the next 3, 5, and 10 years?
  • What’s the impact to your business if the network is offline?

Application requirements:

  • What are your critical applications in your Business?
  • What are the traffic patterns for your applications and users/customers

Technical requirements

  • These are usually the easiest for us nerds and Geeks
  • What vendor hardware are you using today
  • What routing protocols are you using today

There is a pretty good list of questions on the Cisco learning network Unleashing the CCDE blog post called CCDE Book of Questions.  This isn’t an all inclusive list but its really good.

Call to Action:

  • If you enjoyed today’s show, I would ask that you share it on your social media feeds so others can enjoy it as well!  Thank you!

Hosted By: Michael “Zig” Zsiga

Guest Expert: None

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