POC vs. Pilot vs. Production via #Citrix blogs
A good summary here from Scott Campbell! And I see many cases where steps are forgotten, scope’ing being totally off and customer getting unhappy in the end…
To successfully deploy a Citrix solution, it’s important to be aware of how users are interacting with the environment, understand the purpose of the environment, and plan how the environment fits into the support structure. In the course of my 8+ years with Citrix I have seen countless customer environments, and being aware of the items above can make or break your deployment. At a basic level it comes down to understanding the difference between a Proof of Concept, Pilot and Production. There tends to be a few unique commonalities across all POCs, all Pilots and all Production deployments that made them successful.
Additionally, I’ll discuss a hybrid approach that uses a simplified and streamlined approach to accelerate a virtualization project to get a medium sized user population on-boarded.
This article is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but is instead to provide some food for thought to get you in the right mindset and on the right path when planning your virtualization project.
POC – Proof of Concept
It probably sounds intuitive, but the point of a POC is to prove the feasibility of a solution, or the feasibility of a critical aspect of a solution. Typically a POC is trying to answer questions similar to the ones below:
- Will this technology meet our needs?
- Will this product perform as advertised?
- Will the prospective end user communities be productive with the new way of doing things?
- Will the ultimate solution be feasible?
What does a POC look like? In order for a POC to be successful, it must be broken up into the following steps:
- Definition of success criteria.Clearly and specifically defining success criteria will set you up for success. Appropriate success criteria typically come from business decision makers, IT, end-users, or end-user representatives. Obtaining success criteria from the internet or solution vendors typically presents a skewed point of view and probably won’t accurately address what is important to your situation.There are two..
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//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 