5 steps to achieve your collaboration goals
Why effective collaboration matters
Is collaboration in your DNA?
The way we work is changing. To adapt to this shift, we need to rethink how we collaborate to empower our teams, stay agile and create growth.
This working evolution impacts on our technology needs and offers fantastic potential. Strong communication, how we focus and how we deliver results, involve diverse team members and organise for speed are all critical factors.
86% of organisations aren’t fully utilising their collaboration tools. Those that do however report the following impact:
- Created lasting competitive advantage
- Accelerated business results
- Enabled more efficient business processes
- Led to profound, disruptive innovation
Source: Forbes Insights: Collaborating in the Cloud
To achieve all this, we need more intuitive and intelligent tools, meetings that integrate with workflows and enhanced work styles. Together they’ll create a new phase of collaboration across all collaboration modes – hardware devices, software applications, meetings, team collaboration and calling.
But how do we make it happen?
Being truly collaborative takes more than technology. It’s about people making connections and going on a journey to find new ways to collaborate.
In this eBook we’ll show you the five pillars that will help you get to your destination as quickly and smoothly as possible, from IT, to infrastructure and empowering your users.
Step 1: Strategy
Set clear objectives
Step 1: Strategy
Set clear objectives
At the start of your project, you — and your business stakeholders — are bound to have lots of questions.
What can new technology do for us? How much will it cost? When will it start adding value?
But the big question is this: how can you be sure you’re investing in the right collaboration tools for your organisation?
The big picture
One size does not fit all. To build your perfect collaboration environment, you need to match it to your own situation. This means taking account of:
- People: Your users, their activities and process workflows, and the experiences you need to deliver for them, as well as your people strategy, including changes to your workplace policies and your talent pool.
- Business: Your business strategy, drivers and plans — including new sites and acquisitions, changing compliance landscape and a benchmark of what your competitors and partners are doing.
- Finances: The financial situation, including budget constraints, TCO of your collaboration environment, and the ROI of any changes.
- Technology: The wider IT infrastructure, including what collaboration technologies you have in use today, what options are available to you, and your strategic IT preferences (for instance, cloud versus on-premises technologies).
You, your teams, your peers and your board may have very different views on these topics — so it’s important to set a baseline, doing a detailed assessment with interviews and workshops to explore and document the situation.
Focus and prioritise
Don’t get overwhelmed. We recommend identifying a number of use cases drawn from specific lines of business and role types, where new collaboration tools can make the biggest difference. By describing those use cases, you’ll be able to more accurately estimate:
- Increases in productivity for particular processes
- Savings in costs such as business travel or desk space
- Impact on factors such as staff recruitment and retention.
With this you can build a prioritised business case for investment, setting a scoped total project cost against measurable benefits to justify ROI.
Plan your roadmap
You know where you want to go; now you need to define a realistic implementation roadmap that suits your business. This will help you estimate the skill and resources you’ll need for migration and implementation. You’ll find a phased approach, prioritising individual use cases or sites, can help produce quick wins and justify the project to your stakeholders — giving you confidence to move forward.
Let Cisco Collaboration Services help you build an environment that improves how users collaborate. We deliver innovation and expertise to help you get the most from your resources and accelerate a more intuitive way to work. Our experts can help you choose, deploy and manage the right solution.
With the Collaboration Strategy and Roadmap service, we can help you set your project up for success, defining and scoping solutions that fit your specific situation. And we can help build a watertight business case for investment. Our experts have helped organisations of every size, in every industry — take advantage of our experience to accelerate your project.
"The magic is there"
Watch the video to discover why BBVA, one of the world's largest banks, trusts Cisco's experts to transform the way its people work and collaborate.
Step 2: Financing
Build the business case
Step 2: Financing
Build the business case
Financing any IT investment is always a balancing act. We can help you explore ways to fund your initiative that minimise upfront costs and deliver the benefits you want. We’ll also help you build in the flexibility to scale or update outside of planned refresh cycles. Because who knows what the future holds?
When assessing financing options, organisations say the most important factor is:
-
Reducing total cost of ownership (32%)
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Flexibility to manage budgets (16%)
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Accelerated technology adoption (15%)
Source: Forrester: “Financing in the Current Macro Economic Environment”
What are your options?
You could purchase your collaboration solution outright and pay in cash. However, technology investment is likely to be one of many strategic investment priorities competing for your budget.
Alternatively, you could take a bank loan or similar financing options, but you will pay a higher interest rate which will inflate the cost. Plus, you won’t have the option to upgrade or refresh the technology when needed as part of the lifecycle of the solution.
Flexible financing just for you
The Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan lets you deliver collaboration services cost-effectively with one simple, subscription-based offer.
Whether using or deploying on-premises infrastructure, cloud-based services, or looking to simplify your transition to the cloud, it can provide investment protection by including cloud, on-premises, hosted and hybrid deployments – with the flexibility to use them all.
Cisco Capital makes it easy to pay for your Collaboration Flex Plan. We can help you find the best flexible payment option for your collaboration solution, including Cisco hardware and software, services, subscription and even third-party components.
Whether you are at the beginning of your journey or looking to extend and improve existing investments, we can provide you with flexible payment options to suit your organisation’s needs.
No need to worry about upfront costs, either. You can pay monthly for your complete collaboration solution at as low as 0% interest. Bringing everything into one easy-to-manage contract, allowing you to add more solutions to the agreement as your business grows.
You can also benefit from an ongoing flexibility to return, purchase or upgrade your solutions as your business requires. To find out just how affordable collaboration financing could be, contact us.
Find out more about financing with Cisco Capital here.
Step 3: Deployment
Secure, pain-free integration
Step 3: Deployment
Secure, pain-free integration
Implementation is about more than installing new hardware and software. Your collaboration investments should be integrated into your business workflows — and you need a comprehensive approach to protecting the data they carry.
Get up and running, fast
Users depend on their collaboration technologies every minute of every day. You can’t afford any problems with the implementation, no matter what you’re migrating from or how large the deployment.
This is where our Solution Validation Services come in to play. From high-level architecture and low-level design, they can validate performance, scale and availability using their extensive lab equipment and library of test cases.
During the actual rollout, your in-house team may not have the resources or specialist knowledge you need.
Use our implementation services or one of our accredited partners to take the strain. We’ll use our best practices to speed up implementation and minimise risk.
Cisco Collaboration Services has accelerated time to value with a 4-6 month reduction in the time to deploy major new tools or initiatives.
Integrate seamlessly
Collaboration tools deliver the best results when they’re tightly integrated into the rest of the tools and apps that your users work with every day.
Cisco has a thriving developer ecosystem and many integrations are available on our Depot already, from Basecamp and Box to Servicenow and Sharepoint. But every environment is different, so our experts can help you build custom connections with systems including:
- Single sign-on and Active Directory
- CRM systems and Salesforce.com
- Archival and eDiscovery solutions
- Contact centre and helpdesk systems
We’ve designed our collaboration tools to be easily extensible through bots and APIs — and we offer development and advisory services to help you take full advantage, creating experiences that surprise and delight your teams, as well as saving them time every day.
Protect your business
Collaboration can mean carrying sensitive data, so you need to consider security and compliance. Our solutions are rigorously engineered to meet the highest standards of trust and we can help you manage risk at every stage of your project. That includes:
- Compliance assessments and advisory that look holistically at your people, process and technology to help you understand your current position and exposure.
- Meeting and message recording and archival for DLP, eDiscovery and industry-specific compliance requirements.
- Full infrastructure security solutions, from network monitoring through Stealthwatch to endpoint security using AMP and Umbrella.
- Helping you prepare for and respond to security events, with our Incident Response Retainer and Active Threat Analytics managed service.
The average business has 37 collaboration apps in use — and 86% of them haven’t been approved by IT.
Netskope Cloud Report 2016
Step 4: Adoption
Encourage your teams
Step 4: Adoption
Encourage your teams
Only 14% of organisations feel they are fully leveraging the possibilities created by collaboration.
Forbes Insights: ‘Collaborating in the Cloud’
“What if we spend all this money and nobody uses it?” Collaboration investments succeed or fail depending on whether the rest of the business embraces them and uses them to their full advantage. People can be resistant to change: you can’t just put new equipment on their desks and expect them to use it.
So, make sure you bring your teams along for the ride to become a fully empowered, agile workforce.
Better collaboration makes life easier.
Step one is explaining to your users what’s going to happen and why, and sell them on the vision of how better collaboration can make their lives easier. It’s the essence of change management.
Organisations with an “excellent” change-management programme reported 143% ROI.
McKinsey Quarterly: 'Change Management That Pays'
But as an IT team, you’re probably not set up to run internal communications and marketing programmes.
Our adoption services can help. We start by segmenting your users by role or team, so we can communicate to them about the specific ways collaboration can help them with their responsibilities. Then we get the message out.
Whether it’s co-branded, multilingual posters and digital signage around your offices, flyers on desks and in common areas, or infographics and email announcements, we can build and execute campaigns that get your users aware and engaged with the collaboration initiative.
For a more human touch, we can help identify and onboard sponsors from across the business who can drive change in their teams, too.
Train for day one and beyond
It’s easy to forget that not every employee is enthusiastic about technology, and they may need some hand holding to get over their fears and feel confident. With the right training and onboarding, they'll learn what the systems can do and how to use some of the more powerful features.
67% of employees get little or no training on new collaboration tools, and 71% use half or fewer of the collaboration tool’s features.
Softchoice: 'Working Hard or Hardly Networked'
We can provide live or remote training sessions for your users before and after launch, and provide a library of recorded sessions for self-service use later on, alongside documentation and interactive quick start guides — whether that’s for new hires or those needing a refresher.
Don’t neglect your own IT teams and their collaboration knowledge. We offer CCNA and CCNP certifications in collaboration technologies so they’ll have the skills they need to manage and support your infrastructure.
Monitor use and correct
You look around the office and people seem to be using the tools. But are they using them effectively?
We can help you track the KPIs that matter to achieving your goals: which of your user groups are lagging behind in adoption? Which features are getting neglected?
We can monitor these and other factors using data collected directly from our systems, as well as through user surveys and focus groups.
By understanding the problem areas, we can focus exactly where it’s needed, targeting further coaching and training or awareness communications.
Whether you’re starting with a small pilot in a specific office or with a specific user group to prove the value, or scaling your deployment across tens of thousands of users, we can help you make it a success, getting the results you need, faster.
We helped one global hotel brand train and educate hundreds of staff about the power of Webex and telepresence to replace face-to-face meetings. After a six-week programme, the business was on track to avoid $3.5 million in opex costs over five years.
Step 5: Experience
Make it simple, flexible, delightful
Step 5: Experience
Make it simple, flexible, delightful
If you want your teams to keep using your new collaboration tools, it has to be a great user experience. That means unquestionable availability and consistent performance, today and tomorrow.
We’re ready to help
If you’re experiencing any kind of hardware or software outage, configuration conflict, performance degradation or other issue, our technical services are there to help. They’ll use AI-based tools and unique data sets to focus on the root cause and the right solution, quickly.
But our technical services are not just about fixing problems. We’re here to:
- Onboard your team to our management tools
- Advise you on the impact of planned changes
- Help you benchmark your service levels
- Improve your operational processes for managing your collaboration infrastructure
We can also provide you with a single point of contact for support, even in multivendor environments.
If you think all technical support is the same, think again. Take a look at our High-Value Services.
Keep moving forward
New users and teams. New sites. New features and capabilities, integrations and apps. With Business Critical Services, we can help you take all this change in your stride.
Business Critical Services gives you access to Cisco resources. For example, we can help you with network capacity planning and optimising your WLAN coverage, so your users can enjoy high-quality video meetings anywhere in the building.
When the time comes to plan an upgrade, expansion or new solution, turn to us. We can optimise your change-management processes, validate and test new designs with you, support you with solution integration, and give you best practices on maintaining security and compliance as your infrastructure and needs evolve.
And Business Critical Services is there for you anytime, providing access to powerful analytics and automation features, such as the Business Critical Insights dashboard.
This powerful portal gives you an overview of your infrastructure and the power to update software and configurations at the touch of a button.
Discover the more intuitive way to work
Cisco makes working together what it should be — intuitive. Tools that adapt, so teams don’t have to. With clear, crisp video, colleagues and customers feel like they’re all sitting at the same table and everyone can contribute to creating and shaping ideas.
Cisco Webex is technology that puts teamwork first, whether in the office or on mobile devices. Hardware and software make meeting rooms smarter and team interactions flow smoother.
To make the most of intelligent video interactions and achieve true team collaboration, Cisco Collaboration Services for Webex Meetings and Cisco Collaboration Services for Webex Teams can support everyone to be free in the moment, so your team can achieve its potential.
If you want to help your organisation work in a more intuitive way, Cisco Collaboration can help. People can connect as they do in person, in a human way to make the most of their creative energy – where and how they want.
Whether you’re starting out or looking to extend and improve existing investments, we can give your users the tools they need to work more effectively.
With the right expertise at every stage of your project, from strategy, to financing, through to services and ongoing support: you can build for the new era of team productivity. Empowering everyone to move work forward at speed.
With Cisco, you can achieve simple, flexible collaboration, where every member of the team gets the same level of security and performance they need to do their best work, intuitively. Collaboration, yes. Compromise, no.
More than 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Cisco Collaboration Services.
