Managing change involves careful planning—eliminating unknowns, foreseeing the unforeseeable, and figuring out who and what you need before you actually need it. In the planning phase, you consider both technology and organizational issues, including evaluating and distributing devices, assembling a rollout and adoption team, and planning to train the end users in your organization.

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This section summarizes the main tasks in the planning phase. For details, see the Planning tab of the Rollout and Adoption Workbook.

Assemble the Rollout and Adoption Team
Begin by choosing a project manager and IT pro; in many organizations these two roles are filled by the same person. Next, identify an executive sponsor who will provide top-down support and sign the awareness and rollout emails. Recruit people from help desk, training, and marketing who can commit the necessary amount of time to the project, especially now, during the planning phase. Finally, you'll need a web team to set up and manage your Lync intranet site. For details about these roles, see Assembling the Lync Rollout and Adoption Team.

Review the Workbook and Resources
The Lync Adoption and Training Kit contains numerous templates, checklists, and detailed guidance, all representing the collected wisdom of other organizations, including the IT department at Microsoft. Allow plenty of time to go through everything in the kit at the beginning of the planning phase so that you can determine what you can use as-is and what will need to be customized for your organization. For a complete list of the resources in the Lync Adoption and Training Kit, see Resources.

Define Essential User Tasks and Benefits
One of the key components of a successful rollout is to clearly define the four or five most important user scenarios for your organization and the benefits of using Lync to accomplish the tasks related to each scenario. After you've defined key scenarios and benefits, prepare a list of the top 20 user scenarios based on the Lync Server 2010 workloads you plan to deploy. Being clear at the beginning about what you want your users to accomplish greatly simplifies many other planning decisions. For details about this task, see Identifying Essential User Tasks.

Define Success and Reporting Metrics
The Lync Adoption and Training Kit provides a range of methods for measuring the success of each phase of your rollout, including feedback and survey forms, product-related games, and recommended Monitoring Server reports. We recommend using a combination of subjective, motivational, and objective measurement tools and setting specific targets for user adoption and satisfaction. For details about suggested metrics, see Microsoft IT Reporting Metrics.

Plan for Audio and Video Devices
One of the biggest behavior changes for users is learning to use new audio devices to make and receive calls. To evaluate, select, and distribute the appropriate audio devices, you must consider your budget and also the location, user profile, and preferences of your users. For details, see Choosing New Devices at the Lync Server TechNet library.

Create the Adoption and Training Plan
After you've completed the tasks on the Planning tab of the Rollout and Adoption Workbook, you're ready to create an adoption and training plan by revising and updating the tasks suggested in the workbook for each of the remaining phases. The reward for doing this now is that you'll be better able to anticipate potential blocking issues before they occur. You'll also be able to identify areas needing extra lead time, such as producing custom training or printing posters.

The following planning phase tasks are four of the eight most effective best practices for a successful Lync rollout. For details, see Top Eight Best Practices.

• Secure explicit executive sponsorship. Organizations with executives who actively communicate the value and benefit of Lync are more likely to be successful with their rollout.
• Create a dedicated rollout and adoption team. The presence of a dedicated team that's formed during the planning phase and lasts until the end of the adoption has been shown to be an important measure of the rollout's overall success. Make sure to include executives, such as the Chief Information Officer or Chief Technology Officer. These executives don't actually participate in the rollout, but their support is essential to the success of your project.
• Develop clearly articulated goals, success criteria, and timeline. The Lync Adoption and Training Kit provides plenty of specific guidance about this complex success indicator, including the following:
  • Focus on enabling users for the essential tasks. To avoid overwhelming users, focus at first on a few of the most important user tasks—for example, program sharing with peer-to-peer voice—and then make sure that users understand the benefits of the features you're enabling. For details, see Identifying Essential User Tasks.
  • Choose success metrics that tell the whole story. Monitoring Server reports are an important part of your success metrics, but for demonstrating success to upper management, you'll want to include other measures, such as user satisfaction, help desk traffic, reliability, and adoption velocity. For details, see Microsoft IT Reporting Metrics.
• Develop a plan and budget for devices. Devices can be a big part of the budget and a major factor in user satisfaction and help desk calls. Focusing on devices early can prevent problems before they happen and result in significant cost savings later on. For details, see Choosing New Devices at the Lync Server TechNet library.

Others have found the following related best practices useful during the planning phase:

• Consider planning your rollout by server workload. If you rollout by Lync Server workload, you roll out instant messaging (IM) and presence first and then do a more carefully controlled rollout of conferencing followed by Enterprise Voice. For details, see Rolling out Lync by Server Workload.
• Anticipate compatibility and interoperability issues. Begin by reviewing the relevant IT pro documentation: Lync 2010 Compatibility, Client Comparison Tables, and Client Interoperability at the Lync Server TechNet Library. Then, check the relevant end-user documentation—for example, Frequently Asked Questions—and customize as necessary.
• Revisit the planning phase for each new group of users. After you finish rolling out Lync to several groups of users, you'll probably have a good idea of what needs to be changed or improved. Still, feedback from Microsoft customers is clear and consistent: It pays to formally revisit the planning phase before each new stage of the rollout.

Early in the planning phase, Microsoft IT assembled a complete rollout and adoption team that included a full-time project manager and representatives from training, IT, marketing, and help desk. Full-time managers were also appointed to design and guide the internal communications and training efforts.

The team then created a comprehensive rollout and adoption plan, complete with budget, hardware requirements, rollout groups, and a detailed timeline. One important detail that was taken care of early was determining audio device standards. USB phones were chosen as the primary device, with some IP phones available in special cases. Determining this early allowed the team plenty of time to fund and order what can be a fairly significant line item in the overall budget and can take a long time to arrive.

Other groups at Microsoft were asked to help the team develop a set of formal shared goals, including success metrics, adoption numbers, and a rollout sequence. Also included in the shared goals were specific targets for measures such as user satisfaction, frequency of help desk calls, and service reliability.

Next, the team identified key user scenarios and then developed tools designed to highlight the scenarios and collect structured feedback. For example, a Send Feedback button was placed at the bottom of the Lync main window, so users could send feedback to a website and add detailed comments.

Microsoft IT also decided to use an opt-in approach to recruit users for the pilot. Working with pilot participants who volunteered to test the new technology, rather than having it forced on them, greatly improved overall user satisfaction.

Finally, about two months before the actual rollout, the entire plan was presented to senior management for sign-off.