Engagement Management
Managing a large-scale Notes project, or any major development project requires
experience, commitment, and strong leadership from start to finish. Because Notes is
a unique technology, adopting Notes requires a different approach. Users are much
more involved and tend to be highly distributed. Development staff may also be highly
distributed. And you might involve your customers and trading partners, which means
you have "volunteers" whom you manage more through influence than control.

That's why Engagement Management couples traditional project-management skills
with relationship-management skills. This is no simple task. It requires a kind of
sophisticated juggling act because several things are happening in parallel. And it
requires the project manager to be both structured and flexible.

Engagement Management provides a structure that assures a focus on deliverables.
Once you agree on the project plan, we create individual work plans for each Value
Frame. Then we work with you to manage Notes projects, using Notes databases for
project management, system documentation, pilot feedback, and so forth. The result is
that you pay for consulting and project deliverables--not expensive reports in
overweight binders.

Transformation Management
Because Notes enables people to change the way they work in dramatic ways
(working remotely can become standard, for example), managing the process of
change becomes central to success. It must start early and continue throughout a
Notes adoption. To some people, transformation management simply means training.
But other activities are also critical, including user and team analysis, knowledge
sharing, risks-and-rewards analysis, communications planning, and setting priorities to
resolve issues from each phase of a project.

Adopting a collaborative computing paradigm brings up unique issues-issues such as
the fear of sharing information or learning to navigate online information sources. AVM
helps you anticipate potential resistance to new roles and responsibilities. AVM also
helps structure your thinking with respect to rewards and incentives that support
desirable new behavior. The Accelerated Value Method even positions personal and
professional "wins" for users adopting Notes--the people who ultimately determine
project success.

Process Innovation
All too often, when people start a Notes project, they leap into applications
development, automating a current process, without evaluating alternatives. But to
realize the potential of Notes, you need to step back and rethink how you do business.

AVM encourages both critical and creative thinking by questioning the business
context and focusing on high-return opportunities. For example, "What challenges your
ability to compete?" And we put forth "stretch goals" that challenge users to
accomplish in hours what would normally take weeks. These are but a couple of ways
we help users define business goals.

While some techniques in Process Innovation are common to business process
reengineering, the difference lies in AVM's focus on enabling technologies, ranging
from workflow management to document imaging. This technology allows you to break
the rules. Rules like: "people work in offices" or "we need ten signatures." Many
reengineering efforts fail to identify which technology makes the most sense from
either a process or a cost standpoint. In contrast, AVM integrates technology
considerations with process redesign.

Finally, redesigning a process involves identifying which parts of an application should
be built first. In Process Innovation, we begin to define the scope and map the
sequence of project activities into appropriate Value Frames.

Collaborative Development
In Collaborative Development, we take the redesigned business processes and build
applications jointly with clients. With AVM, consultants do not design with user
input--users design systems with coaching from consultants.We introduce the concept
of business-object modeling. To help users grasp this concept, our consultants
sometimes have participants "wear their business object"--perhaps a sales order, a
request for proposal, or a customer service report. By asking, "If I am a sales order,
which processes do I affect and which ones affect me?" we get users to consider the
relationships between various business activities.

Because Notes is an easy-to-use development tool and because users are heavily
involved, Notes developers can come from a variety of job backgrounds. This
enhances the creativity of Notes development. But it also requires a greater emphasis
on a structured software-development approach to keep a project on track and assure
success. A central tenet of AVM is that up-front intensive workshops with users prevent
frustrating rounds of rework. If you want Notes solutions fast, AVM provides built-in
sequencing of activities to help you "get it right" the first time, all with greater user
acceptance.

Enterprise Deployment
Getting it right the first time is particularly important when it comes to system
infrastructure. People judge applications more subjectively than infrastructure. The
network is either up, or it's not. Our databases replicate properly, or they don't. To
achieve both reliability and flexibility, Enterprise Deployment (the most Notes-centric of
the AVM modules) emphasizes planning big and starting small.

You could compare Notes planning to designing an office environment. If you build ten
individual offices with hard walls and single phone lines, but your staff multiplies to 100
requiring a network, your infrastructure is obviously inadequate. Building with modular
cubicles and multiple phone lines gives you flexibility. The same is true for Notes--it's
easier to plan for potential growth and start small than to do the reverse.

Enterprise Deployment takes the mystery out of starting a large-scale Notes project
and eliminates costly "trial and error" approaches. Time and time again, we have seen
ad hoc deployments cost as much as ten times that of a planned Notes roll-out. With
AVM, you learn from the experiences of Notes consultants around the world.

A custom Enterprise Deployment Guidebook establishes guidelines and captures
every technical detail of a Notes deployment: from network topology to administrative
policies. Provided as an online document, you can quickly and easily refer to the
guidebook. More important, it helps you manage system growth.