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Lifecycle Management: What are Business Priorities?
What is Lifecycle Management and why is it a Business Priority?
That’s what we are going to cover today! I’m going to explain it. Then I will highlight one example priority to provide some real-world context! Today we will be highlighting Lifecycle Management!
Consultative Leadership is all about building a business plan that bridges the gap between the Business and Technology sides of a company.
A lot of people that create Network Designs do not justify their decisions based on the business. As we cover Consultative Leadership, we are going to show how you can create a business plan that you can leverage to help drive your businesses’ outcomes and your technology outcomes hand in hand. This allows you to justify each design decision you make along the way!
The Business Priorities for an organization are the foundation of this process! Everything further into this process falls into these Business priority buckets. My suggestion here is to limit the number of Business Priorities to 3 – 5 for each customer/organization. Doing this allows for proper organization and limits overlap between the different priorities. If you have more than that number, then it starts to get confusing.
Lifecycle Management Must Mean Something!
Business Priorities have to mean something to the Senior Leadership Team or the Stakeholders of the company/organization. If Lifecycle Management does not resonate with them feel free to wordsmith it so it does resonate. It’s always better to leverage the customer’s language over your own.
The Description of Lifecycle Management
The description of Lifecycle Management must resonate with each stakeholder you are working with. It is ok and recommended to take time to ensure this is the case. There are times I’ve spent 30 minutes wordsmithing a priority among a group of 5 stakeholders. The goal is that we need the description to make sense and resonate with every stakeholder! The stakeholders need to be on board and invested!
Business Priority Example: Lifecycle Management
Lifecycle Management can be taken in a number of different ways. Some customers will resonate with this wording, while others will want to shift the wording. This is perfectly ok and happens all of the time. Honestly, this is what you want because it shows that your stakeholders are invested in this process with you. As long as it fits with the stakeholders and they are part of the process, this will work out perfectly.
Here is an example description for Lifecycle Management:
- Deploy technology and establish processes that help faculty and administration proactively monitor software and hardware lifecycle
- Deploy technology and establish processes that help proactively monitor software and hardware lifecycle throughout the environment
I like to tell people to think about Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), and what would happen if your Network Access Control certificates expired. No one in your environment would be able to authenticate…. not a good situation to be in. A proper Lifecycle Management implementation can mitigate this from happening. This then ensures Business Success!
No need to Solutionize!
Never once did we talk about a specific vendor or their solution. There is no need to solutionize at the start. Everything must be tied back to the business, and we must ask the following questions:
- Why?
- Why are we doing this?
- What’s the value to the business if we do this?
- What’s the impact to the business if we do not do this?
This process is a tried and true process. These are real, raw, and “in the wild” examples. When conducted correctly, the organization you work for will have a business plan that they can leverage for years to come.
None of what we just talked about was hard or required a huge amount of technical experience or depth. This process is super easy! Its called Consultative Leadership my friends!
More Business Priorities?
- Do you need more examples of Business Priorities? Check out Zigbits Network Design Podcast – Business Priority episodes here:
- Need more Consultative Leadership in your life? Check out our YouTube Playlist here!
- Want to hear more about Network Design, here is our Network Design YouTube Playlist!
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