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Lesson 1
Creating a Testing and Deployment Plan
10-7
Important
It is extremely important that your pilot deployment not include
technologies or
configuration settings that you haven’t previously tested in a lab setting.
Modifying the deploy-
ment between the lab phase and the pilot phase contaminates the results of
the pilot project.
If problems occur, you might not be able to determine whether they result
from a fault in your
original configuration or from the changes you made after testing.
Creating a Pilot Deployment Plan
As with the testing phase, planning and preparation are crucial to a
successful pilot
deployment. The users in the pilot program are not as rigidly controlled in
their activ-
ities as the lab testers are, so there is no need to create specific user
procedures. After
all, the object of the pilot deployment is to have users work as they
normally do. What
does require careful planning, however, is the selection of the pilot users
and creating
a support system for them.
Selecting Users for a Pilot Deployment
There are three factors to consider when selecting the users who will
participate in
your pilot deployment: the nature of the configuration parameters you are
rolling out,
the users’ roles in the organization, and the users’ own capabilities.
Depending on
what parameters you are testing, you might want to select a single workgroup
or
department for the pilot plan, or you might want to select a cross-section
of users
throughout the organization. A single group or department is easier to
monitor and
troubleshoot, but a cross-section provides a better picture of the new
configuration’s
effect on the entire network.
The users participating in a pilot plan should not be performing critical
roles. The users
must be able to tolerate some down time, should problems occur, without
unduly
affecting the company’s business or reputation. In addition, the users you
select should
have temperaments that enable them to deal with problems without panic or
hysterics.
Training Users and Support Staff
Your pilot plan should specify the training your selected users need to work
with the
new configuration. For a pilot deployment of new security parameters, the
user train-
ing might consist of nothing more than a new logon procedure, but if you are
deploy-
ing new applications or operating systems, more extensive training might be
necessary.
You can treat the user training as a dry run for the enterprise-wide
deployment that is
to follow, so the pilot program should include a complete training plan,
including a
curriculum, and identifying who will be performing the training and when.
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