It's all about End User Experience, right?
If you are deploying a VDI solution into your portfolio of desktop services, then you will be migrating users from their legacy devices to their new virtual desktops – but how do you do that?
I talked with a senior exec recently who had experience of building out trading floors and moving individual traders, and in his opinion each move was a project on its own. Maybe migrating a thousand call-center users is a little bit different than a trading floor, and in fact there’s a wide spectrum of users with different migration needs, but I think there are important lessons and practices that could be learned from the trading floor example and apply to the rest of the spectrum.
Take, for example, two simple considerations when you focus on the end user: scheduling, so you don’t impact them, and communication, so you keep them informed and listen to their requirements. Neither of those are technical activities, but how common are they in VDI projects?
Scheduling isn’t as simple as it seems. It’s not just about the milestone when you “flick the switch” and the user is migrated over a weekend to their new device. VDI projects always have ROI targets that equate to “migrate X users per month, and complete Y migrations by the end of the year”. This is a back-office IT constraint that can over-ride the most important part of VDI: the end user. Everyone talks about “end user experience” as the most important aspect of VDI, but they really mean “protocol performance”. It’s my humble opinion that end user experience starts with the migration, so get that wrong and you are looking bad before you start and giving end users a reason to complain. Some key things to do in the schedule:
- The schedule is a compromise between ROI and end-user satisfaction
- Be prepared to bend the schedule to fit around the end-users work.
- Make the schedule transparent with lots of detail about the leading up to the Big Switch and what happens afterwards.
- Make it easy for the end user to communicate with you about the schedule.
- Bundle the end user schedules up into a big VDI deployment schedule and have it colourfully displayed on a wall for everyone to see. Honestly.
Communication is about two ears and one mouth. Consulting with end users does not mean you telling them what is happening, though that is important; it means you listen to them intently because what they are telling you is how to make the migration successful. This might be hard for techies to swallow, but this is marketing and PR. Yes: you have to market your VDI solution, and VDI is such a visible solution that you must do internal PR. That means understanding your market (end users), modifying your product to market requirements and getting success stories to communicate, and much much more. If you don’t have a communication (marketing and PR) section in your VDI plan, then you should.
Much of what you find on the web about VDI is technical and mostly on the important pieces of desktop and application virtualization. Often the underlying, back-office aspects of compute, network and storage and operations are diminished although storage is more talked about because of the IOPS challenges.
What is missing from the web when looking at VDI are the non-technical delivery considerations: just how do you do VDI? Not the architecture, that’s the easy bit! How do I define my strategy, understand my market? How do I deploy it to schedule whilst making it a good experience for end users? How do I operate all twenty layers? How do I even know the solution was successful? How do I merge my End User Computing and Data Center teams? What do the help desk need to know?
It’s a big topic and I just don’t see anyone talking about these issues on the web, or am I missing something?
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I agree Steve.
VDI, or should I say the technology that surrounds it is already well understood. It should be as it has been around for many years architecturally as centralised desktop deployments using Terminal Servers are common place these days. Getting users from traditional desktop environments to the brave new world of VDI is less clear.
It is my view that this is never going to be a simple exercise, but one thing is for sure, gathering as much information as you can about the users environment as well as the hardware is going to be essential if a successful transition is going to be remotely possible. Of course as you have already outlined good communication with users as well as key stakeholders is also going to be a valuable project component.
Here at RES Software we view technology as a necessity but we believe that users really do not care about what technology they use as long as it performs well and provides benefits to the way in which they work. In essence it has to help them.
This has driven us to consider a methodology that disconnects the users from the underlying technology that they use. If we can do this we can then use the most appropriate technology needed for them to do their work. In terms specifically related to VDI it is our view that most users will want to use a VDI infrastructure sometimes but perhaps a traditional systems at other times, maybe as applications may perform better in a traditional environment. This is why we do not consider that the work “Desktop” accurately describes what users need. We refer to a users IT environment as their “Workspace”. A user’s workspace can be run on any underlying technology including VDI and the settings and user personalisation can be totally portable.
We have developed a solution that discovers existing user’s environments and then disconnects them from it by ensuring that any user personalisation is stored without any ties to the technology that the users are using. This whole process is called “Desktop Transformation”. We call it this because we do not feel that migration is what most users want or need. What users do need is to use many technologies but dynamically blended into a workspace that is composed to provide them with the best possible experience.
I hope this gives you an overview to what we do but you can find more at ressoftware.com
Great points, I’m struggling with that very thing, this isn’t the “Field of Dreams” you can’t just build it and they will come. And if like me your looking at someone else hosting your VDI solution it’s even more critical to do the sales job. I think the first thing that you have to do is make your elf eat your own dog food. How are you going to possible sell this to the rest of your company if you are not willing to do it yourself. I see that excuse all to often in our business “oh well I can’t do that it will ruin my productivity”. If it’s not good enough for you then it’s not good enough for your customers. Second never forget that change is never easy I find that if you strategically place “try me” thin-clients in locations, people will start talking about it make it available in confrence rooms or break area’s were folks can take a look at what it is. It’s better then having a tech showup and ripping out your livelihood one day and leaving you with a little black box.