Creating a Deployment Roadmap

Determining Goals and Objectives

During this phase, evaluate Windows 2000 features in relation to the needs of your organization. This is also the time for you to secure executive sponsorship and funding, create focused goals and objectives, and put together a deployment team. Finally, begin using your test lab to investigate Windows 2000 features.

The first milestone is executive sign-off on the overall plan for deploying Windows 2000 in your organization. When defining your plan, outline the high-level business and IT goals of your deployment to provide a clear direction for implementation. Also, clearly define which features of Windows 2000 will be included during various phases of your deployment.

Some questions to answer during this phase include:

Why is your organization deploying Windows 2000?
What business benefits will your organization derive from Windows 2000?
What IT benefits will your organization derive from Windows 2000?
What are the differences between your organization's current IT environment and where you want to be?
When does this project need to be completed and what is the time line?
What is in-scope and out-of-scope for this project?
Who are the users affected by this project?
What are the critical success factors?
What are the risks?
Which groups, organizations, and individuals will be involved in the process?

Some of the documents you might create for this milestone include:

Goals and objectives document.
Outline of current environment, including user profiles.
Risk assessment.
Gap analysis.

For more information about risk assessment and gap analysis, see "Planning for Deployment" in this book.

This phase is important for creating your deployment roadmap. After defining your goals, it is easier to determine the Windows 2000 features you need, and how these features relate to your existing environment. Your analysis can also help you understand critical technology dependencies. While you need to be thorough in your assessment, this phase can be accomplished in a short amount of time. A goals and objectives phase helps you develop a project vision that is shared by the IT department, end-users, and management, and helps create a successful deployment.

Note

Your organization might have already completed this phase, either formally or informally. If management has already made a decision to deploy Windows 2000, you still need to create a goals and objectives document and get formal sign-off before moving to the feature design and development phase.