Perform A Technical Assessment; Zenworks Configuration Management; Section 2.2, "Perform A Technical Assessment - Novell ZENWORKS 10 CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT SP3 - SYSTEM PLANNING-DEPLOYMENT-BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 10.3 30-03-2010 System Planning Manual

The following list presents some ideas on how to perform the business assessment. You might think
of more ideas; use your imagination and tailor your business assessment according to each
organization's unique landscape.
Hold informal workshops and invite leaders from each department.
Survey departmental leaders and find out what they need to become more effective in their
roles. Find out how their staff can become more effective, given the software you are
deploying. Getting departmental leaders to answer a written survey can be very effective and
can give you detail that can be used when building both the high-level and the detailed designs.
A sample survey is provided in
Questions," on page
Make sure you completely understand how the organization is dispersed and which
departments of the organization are represented at each of its physical locations.
Make sure you understand the monthly cycles for each of the departments in the organization.
This will assist you with determining peak times when the organization cannot afford to be
impacted by downtime.
Determine whether the organization is going through an ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)
initiative. This has a direct impact on the solution you design and the services you provide. If
there is an initiative underway, you need to be involved in it and be completely informed. You
want to avoid making design changes mid-project because of the output from another project.

2.2 Perform a Technical Assessment

You next need is for a technical assessment to review what you already have, identify what you
need, and document your requirements.
It is important to note that the technical assessment should be performed at the same time as the
business assessment. The two assessments should take no longer than a week to perform, depending
on the size and complexity of the organization and its infrastructure.
You need to have a good understanding of the existing infrastructure well before you introduce
ZENworks Configuration Management into the environment. In order to do this, you should hold a
set of workshops or meetings to obtain the information you need.
The two main outputs from a technical assessment are documentation on your findings, along with a
set of tasks that you need to perform. Information that you should gather includes the following:
Which operating systems must be supported?
How many users must be supported by the proposed solution?
Will there be support for roaming users?
How many offices and sites must the solution support, and how many users are at each
location?
Where are data centers located?
What is the network architecture, with details on link speeds, and so forth?
Will existing servers will be leveraged to support the ZENworks Configuration Management
infrastructure?
16 System Planning, Deployment, and Best Practices Guide
Section D.2, "Sample Business Requirements Survey
113.