I have recently wrapped up my most successful View deployment yet.  As I look back on the project and reflect on its success, I found this blog post writing itself.  In fact, it wrote itself so well, I plan on breaking it up into three different parts.  

Here are the first five items I have found to be critical success factors I in this and several other projects I consider successful:

1. Trust your consultants.  Keep them on board and informed through the entire process.  Make sure they understand both IT’s goals and the business’s goals.
2. Deliver a complete infrastructure.  It doesn’t have to be completely greenfield, but it should be well planned and completely integrated.  Duct tape should not be taken out of the toolbox for this project.
3. Run a complete and thorough proof of concept and pilot.  Nothing beats running the proposed infrastructure for real.  You might find it won’t work and have to throw away all the time and money, but that’s better than building the entire environment and have to make it work due to the size of the investment.  This also helps you to see around all the vendor half-truths and smokescreens and get a true appreciation of the capabilities of each of the products in the solution.
4. Don’t mold VDI into your current processes, take a fresh approach to both and design and deliver them as a single package. This includes both business and IT processes.  If you can, introduce it along with another major process disrupter.  If you’re introducing a new CRM package that completely changes the way the organization will manage its data, introduce your new VDI processes at the same time.  One is bound to fail if you try to retrain your users twice, so why not completely turn them upside down and only train them once?
5. Completely understand your infrastructure.  A consultant may have designed and built most of your solution, but you need to support it.  Learn all you can from the consultant while you can.  Attach to their hip and don’t allow yourself to be distracted.  Ask where the weak spots are and where the bottlenecks will be.  If you develop a good rapport with the engineer, you’ll learn stuff that the pre-sales team won’t give up easily.  This will lead us into the next tip, but you’ll have to wait for the next post.