By Kevin Lees published: Wednesday, December 12 2007
Virtualization is HOT! For good reason. It’s birthed an industry. Its impact is dramatic and far reaching. It could be said to be the best thing “since sliced bread,” or at least the internet browser.
First there’s its impact on the IT infrastructure. Virtualization has come a long way from its start as a technology with recognized, demonstrable benefits for streamlining and enhancing the test and development environment. It has progressed through prototyping and implementing small-scale, non-production critical server consolidation projects into the realizable, albeit radically different view of the datacenter. The datacenter composed of virtualized pools of servers, applications, storage and network that we are beginning to see today. Additionally, between VMware’s various virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) announcements at VMworld 2007 and Citrix’s recent XenDesktop announcement, virtualization’s impact is extending beyond the datacenter. This move to virtualizing the desktop infrastructure will undoubtedly begin hitting stride in 2008. Desktop virtualization changes the way IT provides the desktop infrastructure. In addition to making the low cost, thin client desktop a tenable solution, hosting the “PC” in datacenter-resident virtual machines fundamentally changes how desktops are managed by IT.
Then, its impact on IT operations and, yes, even the business itself. Essential IT operations’ workflows are affected from how IT provisions infrastructure resources, whether it be storage, virtual machines or desktops, to configuration, capacity and change management not to mention how it even troubleshoots problems. Also, let’s not forget the potential for increasing the number of 9s that can be written into Service Level Agreement uptime provisions due to shortened maintenance windows provided by virtual machine-based infrastructures. Furthermore, as Tiana Conlon, a senior project manager at Foedus, LLC so succinctly put it, “Adopting a virtual model is something that impacts not only how we utilize systems, but how we think about the environment as a whole and that can have quite an impact to not only IT, but the business owners of the applications that become part of this virtual environment”. Virtualization, specifically the speed with which virtual machines can be created and deployed, supports a faster IT response to changing business needs. The cycle time from business need recognition to business solution implementation by IT will continue to shrink as IT standardizes on virtual machine usage.
In short, virtualization is a disruptive technology driving the transformation of IT.
As powerful and as positive an impact this disruptive technology may have, disruption implies risk; potentially serious risk. Risk exists because of virtualization’s potential to touch and affect so much of the business’s supporting infrastructure. Risk increases because, as Tiana points out, “The significance to networks, storage, cost modeling, hardware utilization and strategic value is so high, that it tends to involve larger teams across multiple business units.” Larger teams mean a greater risk of miscommunication resulting in disjointed activities. The greatest risk is that the real, bottom-line impacting benefits of virtualization are never fully realized.
So how do you mitigate these risks and, thereby, increase the probability of truly realizing virtualization’s benefits? One fundamental answer is to apply a structured project management approach to your virtualization projects. A solid project management approach, along with an experienced project manager, of course, will help ensure the critical planning, communication, follow-up and coordination that are needed to successfully complete your virtualization project and fully realize the benefits, while mitigating the risks, of this disruptive technology.
The intent of this series of articles is to provide you with a practical project management approach to your virtualization project. An approach based on a globally recognized set of best practices. In addition, these articles will present implementation details and considerations based on lessons-learned in applying the approach, My hope is they will result in you realizing an enhanced ability to undertake and increase the probability of successfully completing your virtualization projects – no matter how small or large they may be.
The approach to which I refer is guided by the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) project management lifecycle as described by their “A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge.” I like and employ PMI’s approach for several reasons. First, it’s a framework providing key inputs, tools & techniques, and key outputs but doesn’t prescribe what these look like or dictate how to achieve them. Being a framework, it’s sufficiently flexible to be adapted to your specific project. Secondly, PMI’s approach is the culmination of input from the project management community and is based on real world-based experience. Third, it consists of guidelines and best practices that evolve (they’re on their third edition) so it is not based solely on techniques from some past point in time but rather grows as the discipline progresses. Then there is the large body of knowledge available both in the way of books and courses. Finally, PMI provides a way to benchmark your depth of understanding, based on knowledge and experience, via the globally recognized Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.
PMI’s project management approach is built around a project management lifecycle consisting of five components: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling, and Closing. The remainder of this first article describes how to approach and what to watch for while applying the Initiating component to a virtualization project. The second article in the series is devoted to Planning as this is absolutely critical to a virtualization project, and the final article will address Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing a virtualization project.
As mentioned, we’ll begin with Initiating. Initiating supports the formal authorization of a project. During this component of the project management lifecycle, the business needs are enumerated, the project is justified, described, and selected, the project sponsor identified and the project manager assigned. In a nut shell, it gives the project existence. The output from this set of processes is typically a project charter and preliminary scope statement. As project justification, selection, and sponsor identification are typically done at the management level in a business, this article focuses on the project manager’s perspective of Initiating.
So the project’s been approved. Now what? Relative to a virtualization project, a good starting point is to explore the sponsor’s and non-IT stakeholders’ level of understanding and acceptance of virtualization. This will help gauge their level of buy-in and support throughout the project as well as perhaps give an indication of how difficult or easy the road to project completion and success will be. Also determine if this is a strategic undertaking or a “try-it-out” virtualization project. A virtualization project meant to address a strategic need clearly requires a different level of stakeholder communication than an exploratory project as well as a greater emphasis on risk management.
What you need to walk away with from Initiating, is an agreed to understanding of not only the project but management’s and the customer’s (sponsor’s) expectations. Understanding the project implies asking lot of questions and, most importantly, listening. Relative to this, an indispensable technique to master is emphatic listening. Emphatic listening is actively listening, that is not concurrently evaluating what is being said, with the only goal being to understand what the speaker is saying. The result of this, and what is used to ensure an agreed to understanding of the project and expectations, is the development of the project charter and preliminary scope statement.
Creating the project charter and preliminary scope statement, in my opinion, is necessary regardless of the virtualization project’s size. Without them, scope creep is almost guaranteed. While necessary, these needn’t be tomes. I’ve settled on combining the charter and preliminary scope statement into, whenever possible, a one page Project Overview Statement. The Project Overview Statement contains: a description of the project’s goals and objectives in terms of business needs and deliverables; the project’s success criteria; and any assumptions, constraints and high-level risks that may be defined at this point. I’ve found this to be a great way to succinctly reflect my understanding the project. And, after meeting with the stakeholders (sponsoring, business and technical) to review and agree to its content, can move forward with confidence that everyone, from a stakeholder perspective, has had their expectations set relative to the project’s purpose, parameters and what defines project success. The Project Overview Statement I develop for virtualization projects is based on the Project Overview Statement as described in “Effective Project Management” by Robert K. Wysocki, Robert Beck Jr., and David B. Crane. This is a great book, by the way, that presents some very effective, yet simple project management techniques and one which I highly recommend.
When developing a Project Overview Statement for a virtualization project, there are a couple of things you need to consider. First, explicitly include some statements via the projects goals and objectives that describe how this project is aligned with corporate and any affected business unit’s strategic goals. This can go a long way to gaining active management-level, stakeholder support. Also include explicit statements concerning what is NOT included in the virtualization project. I cover these in my project assumptions and have found that they make scope management easier as well as help reduce the risk of stakeholder misconceptions as the project moves forward.
Having been involved in many projects over the year, whether I was the sponsor, a technical participant, or the project manager, I realize that the beginning of a project is one of the most exciting times in its lifecycle. Of course the sponsor wants to see results as quickly as possible. And, I don’t think there is any disagreement that the tendency as a technical participant is to want to begin implementation as quickly as possible, especially with a technology as “cool” as virtualization. I know, I’ve been there. Unfortunately, this more often than not ends in the project being one of the many included in the industry’s alarming “failed IT project” statistic. The Initiating component of PMI’s project management lifecycle is a great first step to avoid inclusion. The next, and arguably the most impactful, step is the subject in the next article of this series – Planning.
Kevin Lees
Kevin is the principal consultant at Premier Project Management, LLC, where he specializes in IT infrastructure architecture development as well as planning and managing IT infrastructure, virtualization, and data center consolidation/relocation projects. He is a Project Management Professional and VMware Certified Professional with 26+ years of technical, management, and consulting experience in systems integration, project management and IT operations. Recent engagements include performing an enterprise-wide IT Infrastructure & Operations assessment as well as planning and managing a multi-datacenter consolidation / relocation, using virtualization, in the publishing industry; managing the implementation and operational "go-live" of two e-mail platforms for an international e-mail ASP; and providing technical project management and virtualization services for the assessment phase of a multi-datacenter consolidation / relocation project in the on-line, e-mail marketing service provider space. Kevin can be reached at
kevin.lees@premier-pm.com.
