During my 20 years designing networks I have experienced every kind of business stakeholder. From the stakeholder who pushes for the best long-term solution, despite short-term delay and upfront cost, to those who take the “just make it work, we’ll tidy it up later”, approach, which of course they never do.
At Starfish, we believe it is the role of our Network Architects and Designers to always present the best possible solution and execution plan to fit the business requirements. We will extol the benefits of doing it properly and caution on the risks of cutting corners. But ultimately, the final decision lies with the business stakeholders and if they decide on short-term convenience over long-term thinking, then the risk sits with them.
Of course, before you can push for the perfect solution and plan, you need to create it. Today, I wanted to share the methodology that we use at Starfish vLabs to deliver network projects with a high certainty of outcome. When we communicate this with partners, they regularly adopt the methodology and trust us to deliver end to end for them. The methodology has been developed from our collective experience across transformation projects in industries such as Service Provider, Investment Banking, Insurance, Higher Education, Military, Retail and Local Authorities.
The methodology involves three stages and produces nine key artefacts. The stages and artefacts are executed and created in an order which starts at a very high level and gets progressively more granular as the detail crystalizes. Below is a summary of these stages and artefacts, and we will follow up in future publications to describe the individual artefacts in more detail.
- Architecture Consultancy
- Activities
- Stakeholder Consultation
- Current Environment Discovery
- Modular Solution Design
- Artefacts
- Target Architecture Document
- Roadmap Document
- Activities
- Design and Planning
- Activities
- Stakeholder Consultation
- Vendor Engagement
- Operations Engagement
- Design Creation
- Plan Creation
- Artefacts
- High Level Design (HLD)
- Low Level Design (LLD)
- Bill of Materials (BoM)
- Implementation Plan
- Test Plan
- Migration Plan
- Activities
- Build
- Activities
- Procure BoM
- Execute Implementation Plan
- Execute Test Plan
- Execute Migration Plan
- Artefacts
- Schedule of Events (SoE) – One for each significant change.
- Activities
Aside from the final deliverable, the process of creating of the artefacts is critical to successful delivery for two reasons. The first and most obvious is the creation of documents that can be shared with project stakeholders for approval. Secondly and crucially, the creation of these documents is the time we take to fully understand every aspect of the solution. This process should not be rushed, it is the time at which we pre-emptively identify and resolve problems, explore new ideas, collaborate with vendors and partners, and ingrain the solution into our minds. To skip or rush this process is a false economy, it will lead to missed opportunities or the identification of problems late in the process, when it may be too late to remediate.
At Starfish, we always make the documentation process collaborative. This means providing stakeholders with early visibility of the document structures and the drafts, before accepting feedback and refining. This allows Network Architects and Designers to progress with confidence, raise issues as they inevitably arise and bring everyone along for the journey.
While this process may seem time-consuming, we believe that it provides our partners with the greatest certainty of outcome. If you would like any further information on this process, or any other Starfish services, do not hesitate to contact us on info@starfishlabs.io or follow us on LinkedIn.
About Starfish vLabs: Starfish vLabs is technology services business focused on the design and building enterprise class networks using the latest technologies. Operating across all major network domains including campus, data centre and WAN, we work with the leading industry vendors such as Cisco, Juniper and VMware.
We believe in the Starfish Principle; we know that we cannot fix all of the world’s problems, but we can make a significant positive impact on the people and organisations that we do work with. To achieve this, we place a focus on outcomes, which we deliver through a culture of focus, integrity, openness and continuous technical development