ViewYonder

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?