Objectives of the Unified Communication Project

We have discussed some of the issues of the central communication project. Now we will go on to the previous article to provide additional instructions on this. Through interviews with experts, we know that the Unified Communication project cannot be viewed on one side, and we need to pay attention to more aspects.

Interview with stakeholders

"If you are preparing to perform a demand evaluation, I will go to different business departments and learn about their specific business needs," Herrell said. "Is it difficult for them to communicate with other colleagues in the team? Is it difficult for remote collaboration staff to find and contact each other? Are there employees who are unclear about all positions of other team members? Does it take one day to hold an internal teleconference ?"

She said the demand evaluation team could use this opportunity to find tactical opportunities that can win quick returns. Video conferencing and remote monitoring vendors selling products are a good opportunity to reduce costs. In addition, high-quality video communication can reduce traditional face-to-face meetings and reduce travel expenses. In addition, there are other ways to reduce costs and costs ."

Herrell mentioned the cost of teleconference. Companies can stop using internal teleconference provided by service providers and turn to a new IP Phone platform. The cost of unified desktop communication training can also be reduced. Previously, production efficiency due to the decrease caused by remote training has been improved.

Yu believes that interviews with stakeholders are more important and effective than surveys. "We usually start with an in-depth interview. Only in this way can we have a basic understanding of the preferences of interviewees," he said. With this understanding, we will verify our assumptions through investigation. However, I think in-depth interviews have indeed laid a good foundation ." Y further emphasizes the importance of end user classification. If the evaluation team correctly classifies users, it only needs to interview several key representatives in each part.

Herrell said the interview was better than the investigation when talking to users, especially if the unified communications project team wanted to sell their project to the budget manager. "The problem with unified communication is that people are always trying to promote the company's concept," she said. If the investigation only involves direct technical and cost, the boss will say that there is no such budget. However, if the Unified Communications Project Team informs the budget supervisor of the ideas of the company department owner, the supervisor will be willing to listen. The project owner can introduce the various business processes that are being implemented due to the lack of effective communication and collaboration tools. The project team should let the other party know that the demand evaluation is to truly solve business problems, not just a scientific project ."

Focus on business processes rather than labor productivity

Herrell suggested that, after classifying company personnel, they can begin to determine the key business processes carried out by personnel of each category. The evaluation team should negotiate with relevant groups to determine key business processes and identify obstacles to facilitate the smooth process. She said: "individual employees have improved production efficiency and reduced the waste of time. They do not fully prove the role of Unified Communication. Instead, they need to associate Unified Communication with the company's most important business processes, see if it promotes the business process."

Yu said: "We work for a pharmaceutical company and find that their sales staff are very seriously lost. Sales staff often leave their mobile phone numbers to customers on long business trips, so that they can easily take customer resources away when they leave or change jobs ." Yu proposed a method to eliminate this phenomenon: "In fact, this problem can be solved using very simple technologies. For example, assign a separate phone number to each salesperson, which belongs to a sales department and the customer sees the same number. When a customer calls a salesperson, the bell rings only when the agent is in charge of his sales representative. This is a very simple solution that most Unified Communication vendors can do. The result is to increase customer satisfaction, speed up, and significantly increase the order volume ."

The goal of the Unified Communication Project is to benefit everyone.

On the surface, deploying Unified Communication is a hot technology that everyone is very keen on. "People who are used to unified communication do not want to give up," Herrell said. "People say it is much better now than before ."

She said, this is just an illusion that not all people are lucky. The IT department may be able to get a sum of money from a pilot project, but IT is not easy to carry out large-scale deployment if the project team cannot achieve considerable results.

"The consequence of not doing a demand assessment is inevitably blocked everywhere," Herrell said. "Dividing employees into groups where instructions are sent to other groups is a development trend. I think Unified Communication will eventually become popular, and people do not need to discuss it, because using these tools will make the work more effective. However, in the early stages of use, you must conduct research and give reasons to explain your business needs. It seems that when there was no voice mailbox in the past, people used notepaper to leave a message. Today, people will say they cannot leave messages like this. But at that time, everyone thought this was the best way to leave a message, and once the information was lost, people lost contact ."