We all know one simple truth -success is never guaranteed. If you peel back the layers to find out what determines successin collaboration deployments, you'll often see that unaddressed details have the potential to stifle collaboration instead of improving it and can spoil your investment from the start.

Here's an example. Let's say you recently invested in upgrading your existing collaboration technology to enable cloud calling and meetings. You gather all the migration requirements, including organizational compliance necessities, and carefully plan out the details. You take the time to fully integrate third-party platforms and company directories. You even create a step-by-step plan to help your employees use the new system. But three weeks in, your employees are frustrated because people are missing meetings. What went wrong?

Something as simple as calendar integration is fundamental to proper collaboration deployments, but in many cases, small things like this get overlooked. Even pinpointing a specific problem could prove troublesome if it's difficult to extract performance metrics from the network -another small issue that could create bigger problems. Cisco Services can help you consider these foundational elements and build a plan to make your deployment hassle-free and successful.

Regardless of your current collaboration infrastructure, there'salmost alwaysa way to optimize your operations further and reduce costs. In fact, our services encompass a customer'sentire journey, from advisory and implementation to optimization and technical support, to help you get more value from your investments. SeeFigure 1for more.

Figure 1: Collaboration Services customer examples

For example, let's say you want to increase productivity through collaborative Huddle Room spaces. Our Strategy & Roadmap service, part of our Advisory Services, can help you develop a comprehensive strategy that aligns your technical and business objectives to prioritized use cases so that your Huddle Rooms will efficiently achieve your goals. And our Video Everywhere Readiness Assessment, part of our Design service, can help you understand whether your video infrastructure and network will support additional voice and video traffic. Our experts can let you know where deficiencies might lie and can help you proactively solve your problems before they arise. Even if you have already deployed a solution, our Advise & Implement service can help you integrate calendars, directories, third party applications, and more into your current Huddle Room infrastructure so that your team can more readily connect with important people and information.

We understand that our customers have different requirements and expectations at different stages in their journey. Every situation is unique and to properly prepare our customers for success, we have services in place that will address those needs whenever necessary.

Take, for instance, a global pharmaceutical company that recently had difficulties with problem resolution and performance visibility across its complex legacy architecture. Our Business Critical Services team and Solution Support team quickly went to work and was able to amplify the customer's collaboration infrastructure and network performance visibility using a custom analytics dashboard. This provided real-time access and an easy-to-use solution that not only reduced future risk and costs through fewer performance issues but also allowed better collaboration between their operations leaders. For cloud calling, an analytics dashboard such as this could help you see why your on-the-go calls are not high-quality. On the other hand, this kind of capability could show how advanced diagnostics for Huddle Rooms, such as people count and meeting performance, could serve as optimizations for larger deployments based on usage patterns.

Lastly, we want you to get the most out of your collaboration investment because we know how difficult it can be to get everybody working on the same page. To help with this, we've introduced certain services to help accelerate employee usage because after all, if no one uses the technology, what good is it? If your new cloud calling technology isn't helping employees collaborate more, there may be underlying issues that need to be addressed. If it's taking too long for people to sign in, consider letting us help you implement a Single Sign-On (SSO) Integration to make it easier for people to join meetings. If people are consistently missing meetings, perhaps a Calendar Integration service can make reminders easier. Finally, if managing resistance to changes proves difficult, our "Adoption services (User Solution Empowerment (USE))" may be the right fit for you. We provide customized processes, tools, and techniques from certified change management professionals to help end users adopt your collaboration products and technology with greater speed and effectiveness.

Wherever you are in your collaboration journey, Cisco Services can help you spot problematic assumptions ahead of time and improve your current processes so your solution can reach maximum effectiveness. Learn more about improving your organization today through Cisco Services.