Lessons learned

The NGMAN project taught us important lessons about selling major projects to a large and diverse university. Many of these lessons contain principles that can be used for any enterprise network project.

* Establish a strong business case at the beginning of the project: It is important that the proposed network make financial and business, as well as technical, sense. The days of implementing new IT projects simply because they look technically promising are gone. Today IT is all about business benefits.

* Sell the project: It is essential that you obtain buy-in from key decision makers. This extends far past technical decision makers. The key influencers need to be consulted, no matter where they work in the organization.

* Understand the project scope and funding from the beginning: It sounds obvious, but setting a scope with which all parties agree and obtaining a reliable funding source aren't as straightforward as they once were. Today, more homework is needed to assure that upper management, the budget office and the network designers are all on the same page.

Fritz is director of enterprise network services for the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the Network World Lab Alliance. He is the author of Remote LAN Access: A Guide for Networkers and the Rest of Us, and Sensible ISDN Data Applications. He can be reached at jnfritz07@yahoo.com.