By Eli Loving | Director of Training, TechOrchard
So your company is going to hand out a bunch of tablets to its workers? You’re the one responsible, and you have no idea how you’re going to get 500 tablets out the door looking like they’re supposed to, with the right apps, configurations and controls. Plus, you need to be able to provide security and logistical support after giving these things out. You aren’t being allowed to hire any additional staff to do this. It’s all you. Oh, and one more thing: the conference these are being launched at is being held next month. Good luck!
Does any of that sound familiar? It does to me, as I hear it often. While 1 month to prepare for anything over 500 devices is pretty tight (your bottleneck is often just getting the hardware), it isn’t unheard of. I’ve helped with many of these deployments and not often in optimal conditions. I won’t share all my tips and tricks with you (that’s what you pay us for!), but here are a few items to consider before you get in touch with specialized resources.
Bottom line: Don’t stress! A large deployment with minimal snags is possible if you plan it right. Get in touch with someone who has done this before and use the expertise they’ve gained from wading through other deployments!
Get help
It’s really, really unlikely that you’ve got the time, staff AND experience to cover all the bases you need to cover — especially in this economy of down-sizing and out-sourcing. If you do, it’s still a good idea to contact an external resource that has carried out large-scale deployments of hardware. This isn’t to say that you or your company doesn’t have the skill to get the job done, but a specialized company (like TechOrchard) does it all the time and has already made the mistakes a first-timer would make. More importantly, we don’t have to think about generating TPS reports while sorting the details on the deployment.
Confirm the requirements as early as you can
All of these tips are important, but this one is particularly important. It isn’t that you have to hard-code these requirements in simulated stone, but having as clear a picture as possible when it comes to what will be on the tablets will help the planning stage, and will dictate which steps take place when in the process. Some things to think about:
- Will I be managing these tablets after I hand them out?
- What apps will be on these tablets? Size? Commercial or private? How will I be pushing/paying for them?
- Does the company require any specific aesthetics (think background images, engraving, on-screen personalization, etc.)?
- What corporate collateral will be placed on the devices pre-handout?
- Will the data on the devices be subject to any regulation? (Are you a lawyer, doctor or financier, or do you work with/for the government?)
- What HR policies need to be enforceable on device content?
- Do you have a usage policy written and prepared for the users to sign and accept?
The list goes on and on, but that should get you started. Also, have a drop-dead date on changes to the requirements. Once you (or the company doing it for you) has started a provisioning process, it can be very difficult to go back and make mass changes. The more elements at work (and especially if there are management layers on the devices), the more costly (in time and money) changes are when you start the provisioning and management-enrollment processes.
Have a plan
This one is a no-brainer. Plans help you scale your execution, prepare for curveballs and just generally make things go more smoothly than rollouts without one. However, building plans for something you might not have done before can be rather daunting, frustrating or even downright annoying. Here again is where having someone who has done this 30 times before help you is a real bonus.
Test
Again, sort of a no-brainer, but I’ve personally seen two really great on-paper deployment plans that weren’t put through a couple simple test runs melt down in spectacularly embarrassing ways. Test out your plan, work out the kinks and don’t leave cheap real estate for Mr. Murphy to chew on your shiny new toys.
Train
Training the users of the tablets is a step that nearly every client I’ve worked with overlooks. If you are deploying to a group of 15-24 year-olds, then by all means, skip the training; but if you are like most of the clients I work with, users will need at least some form of basic training.
Without training (and especially in the case of teachers and sales professionals), tablets will likely become very costly paperweights or toys for the employees’ grandchildren. For the clients that do forego the training, all but one ended up coming back to the company I currently work at for some sort of training — both basic training and on specific business-process training. Training is a relatively low-cost insurer of more rapid device and process uptake. Do it.
Hopefully this gives you a few things to think about when considering your deployment. Don’t go it alone; there are too many moving pieces in today’s increasingly non-standard, increasingly-mobile biztech universe.
