Organizational issues should always be foremost in your mind when deploying a Notes application. The issues that will cause the failure of your Notes project are overwhelmingly likely to be organizational and political issues, not technical issues.
There is no way to overemphasize the importance of putting together a strong project team and actively involving the entire organization. For Notes to be successful, most organizations have to change both the way they work and the prevailing attitude about
sharing information. You need to communicate the benefits that each person will see as well as the benefits to the whole organization, and do it in a way that people will accept and understand.
This chapter explores the issues involved in preparing organizations, both large and small, for Notes. The human side of a Notes deployment is discussed. Specifically, this chapter discusses
This chapter is an extension of Chapter 5, "Building a Deployment Plan." Chapter 5 presents the overall approach, and this chapter discusses a few points in more detail.
Each company will follow its own path getting from that first kernel of an idea when someone in your organization decides, "We should use Notes," to the point where you are ready to form a project team to explore ways of actually using Notes.
Somewhere along the way, early in the process of evaluating Notes, each company will form a project team that will become the core group responsible for the overall success of the Notes implementation in your organization. Your primary Notes team should
have one member assigned to each of the key roles described in the following sections.
You may notice that similar but slightly different lists appear in Chapters 6 and 7. The list in this chapter is the most detailed and represents a compilation and extension of those lists.
The role of the evangelist can be critical to the success of Notes in a medium-to-large organization. The evangelist has the responsibility to spread the word, generate enthusiasm, gather feedback, and generate interest. Most organizations can't start
with an enterprise-wide commitment to Notes. You will have to generate that development through successes and by talking about those successes.
The evangelist can generate enthusiasm about Notes in several ways. After a few people are using Notes databases, Notes provides one natural way to spread the word. Other ways include
The evangelist needs to recruit key people in each of your business units and geographic locations, using this expanded team to communicate to the entire organization.
No matter what methods you use to communicate information about your Notes project, you should be utterly relentless in publicizing Notes and the advantages it brings, the coming organizational changes, the organization's reasons for adopting Notes, and
the benefits/challenges each person faces.
The evangelist should be someone, usually an executive, with visibility throughout the entire organization. This visibility can be critical in gaining acceptance from various operating divisions.
The key job of the project manager is to develop a time line and budget, track progress against the budget, and communicate that progress to the executive steering committee. A Notes rollout project manager faces the following issues:
Notes project managers should have experience with client/server projects. A mix of applications development and operations experience is especially helpful.
The Notes server administrator will be responsible for maintaining the Notes servers after they are installed. The Notes server administrator should be the person who will eventually head up the support staff on an ongoing basis. The server
administrator is responsible for the following tasks:
Notes system administrators should have experience with desktop operating systems (Windows, OS/2, or UNIX, depending on which one you are using), experience with client/server applications, and, most importantly, experience administering network
operating systems. Experience administering network operating systems is a must because most problems with Notes involve the network in some manner. Individuals with all these skills are in high demand and many organizations will have to accept someone
with only some of this experience and provide training to round out his skills.
Responsibilities of a database manager (preferably the manager for the pilot database) involve approving changes to the access control list and to the design of the database. Each organization has many database managers, each responsible for a different
set of databases. Database managers often are business unit executives or managers responsible for the people who primarily use an application, or for the department that "owns" the data in a particular database. The database manager doesn't have
to be the person who physically updates the database, although she should be the person who approves all updates. If the database manager isn't the person who actually performs the updates to the access control lists and design elements, you should create
some kind of Notes workflow application that automatically documents all the database manager's approvals.
The database administrator is responsible for monitoring the database logs to ensure that replication is working, and for checking the performance of the database. The database administrator role often is performed by the Notes server administrator. The
database administrator should work closely with the database manager who "owns" the data stored in the database.
A Notes database administrator needs to understand Notes security and replication. A background administering other client/server databases is desirable, but not necessary.
The support engineer is the primary person responsible for installing and troubleshooting Notes. The support engineer should be capable of installing the operating systems, network, Notes software, and hardware. In a large organization, the support
engineer on the rollout team will become responsible for managing whole teams during the latter stages of the rollout. These teams will install (or upgrade) the hardware and software required for your Notes network. As with the Notes administrator, the
support engineer on the rollout team should be the one responsible for Notes support in an ongoing manner. The experience gained through the rollout is critical in the long-term success of Notes. A typical Notes support staff person should have several
years experience with network hardware and software, especially the type of network with which you intend to run Notes, and including telecommunications if you intend to use modem dial up.
You should have a network administrator on the Notes deployment team. The network administrator will be responsible for participating in designing the Notes network and bringing to the team the knowledge gained through rollout and support of current
client/server applications.
The rollout team also must have a representative of the users of the pilot applications. Normally, this is a first-line manager responsible for supervising the people who will be using the application, but it also can be a key user. The user
representative often isn't a full-time member of the team. You don't need to limit this representative to one person. You can involve whole groups of users, at various points and at various levels of time commitment. This method is definitely encouraged,
although there needs to be someone actively involved in the rollout plan who represents and can bring to the table the interests of the people who actually have to use the application.
It is also important to have an operations representative. With client/server applications development in the past, you probably have not had to involve operations staff from the very beginning. With Notes, the operations staff will need to work very
closely with the application development staff. There have been cases where the operations staff has caused huge headaches for the applications and support staff. It's also easy for the application developers to cause distress for the operations staff.
It's important to bring both of these representatives together early in the rollout.
The operations person will be responsible for helping to develop the standard operating procedures for Notes, and for making plans for rolling out the Notes servers into the environment that is currently supported. He must make sure that the standard
operating procedures integrate well (to the extent possible) with the current operating procedures. It's also important for the operations staff person to have knowledge of the current operating procedures within the organization, as well as the skill
level of the operations staff.
The application developer is responsible for designing and implementing the pilot application. The application developer should be familiar with rapid-application-development methodologies, have some understanding of an operations staff job, and have
experience in client/server application development. Experience gathering requirements from multiple groups and reconciling those into a single application is desirable. Obviously, your application developer for your Notes rollout should have experienced
the rollout of a major client/server application in the past.
The trainer is responsible for developing the training strategy for the deployment team, end users, and support staff. The trainer may run trainings and/or evaluate training companies. The trainer will be responsible for developing a skills assessment
for the user base and coordinating their training with the Notes rollout.
Involve a trainer early in the Notes project. Training is a key element in any Notes deployment, not an incidental requirement.
It's a good idea to include someone from your help desk on the Notes rollout team so that he or she can gain experience with the Notes platform in your organization. This experience cannot be gained in training sessions and after-the-fact discussions
with the rollout team. Ideally, the help desk person assigned to the rollout team will be responsible for designing and implementing a strategy for staffing and training the help desk.
Each remote site will need at least one remote-site coordinator. Responsibilities of the remote-site coordinator include rebooting servers and helping the support staff. The ability to answer usage questions would be a plus. If your pilot application
involves any remote sites, select and train a remote-site coordinator early. This position is not a full-time position.
The certifier is responsible for verifying the identity of Notes users, safeguarding the certifier ID files for the organization, issuing certificates, and issuing cross certificates. The certifier must ensure that the person receiving a certificate is
actually the person whose name is listed in the ID file. Certifiers shouldn't routinely certify ID files without checking with the person requesting the certificate to verify that the request is valid.
Carefully select the project manager and evangelist. They should have the confidence of your CEO.
The executive team should be involved with any Notes deployment, and the managers of the deployment should be comfortable dealing with executives.
The first step in preparing your organization is to staff your rollout team. As they start to develop and execute the deployment plan, they will begin to involve other parts of the organization.
Not every one of these people will be full time immediately, depending upon the size of your organization and the speed with which you roll out Notes. You may start with a project manager, an application developer, and a systems administrator. Even if
everyone will not be actively involved full-time at the beginning, you should identify the members of the team.
Some roles may not be filled immediately, but add them as soon as you possibly can. You will have a core team of IS staff responsible for installing Notes, developing applications, and supporting end users, along with managers and executives to provide
support and direction. Without this combination, your Notes installation could be in trouble.
The tasks that the rollout team has to accomplish are listed in Chapter 5, "Building a Deployment Plan." They need to assess the current status of the enterprise. They should generate an accurate inventory of computer and networking equipment
currently installed. The team should also evaluate the political readiness of the organization. They need to gather input from key parties throughout the organization and define the scope of the Notes deployment, design the Notes network, begin to staff
the ongoing support organization, define the standard operating procedures, choose and build the pilot application, train users, install hardware and software, and organize and implement the rollout of the pilot and the first production applications. Then
the team must make sure that all lessons learned are passed on to the ongoing support team.
The project team will not necessarily have the same set of players for the entire Notes deployment. In addition to the natural attrition any team faces, a Notes deployment has several phases that require a different mix of skills. As with any
client/server systems rollout, there is a difference in the skill set needed to initially develop Notes applications and the skills needed to maintain Notes applications.
The key difference between the rollout team and the ongoing support team is that the project manager responsible for planning and implementing the rollout project may not be the same project manager responsible for long-term support of Notes. Several of
the issues, such as dealing with change and generating enthusiasm, go away to some degree with an ongoing support role. However, in many organizations, the project manager will stay the same. The ongoing support team will be more heavily loaded with
support engineers and administrators than the initial rollout team, and will probably not have a permanent representative from the users staff.
Another key difference is that the rollout team, due to the heavy workload involved with upgrading and installing hardware and software and the extra troubleshooting and testing involved during the initial rollout, will probably be larger than the
ongoing support staff. You should plan to start filling the ongoing support staff positions as soon as possible. Whenever possible, the people on the rollout team should be the people chosen to be the ongoing support staff.
After staffing the rollout team, the next step is to assess the readiness of your organization. We recommend holding joint-application-design sessions that are very specialized meetings designed to quickly get all the issues and concerns on the table.
One key side benefit of holding JAD sessions is visibility across the enterprise as you start to involve different business units in the Notes rollout project. The rollout team will start to design and implement the deployment plan.
As your Notes rollout project proceeds, you need to begin filling the permanent support staff positions. As you begin to lay out the issues, define the scope of the deployment, and design your Notes network, you will have a better approximation of the
number of people you will need to support Notes on an ongoing basis. Typical tasks for which you need to plan in an ongoing Notes support include troubleshooting your installed Notes applications, testing new Notes applications, administering Notes,
handling problems with end users, training new users, developing new Notes applications, and managing the continued rollout of Notes past the first production implementation. Specifically, ongoing support includes
A key task is assigning someone to terminate access to Notes users who leave the organization. There must be a person assigned to removing access. Terminating access involves removing the user's ID from the Name and Address Book and adding the name to
the deny-access lists for all servers.
A typical support staff will number around ten people for a large organization. This number includes just the centralized support staff. You also need one person at each remote site who can, at a minimum, reboot the server. Chapter 5, "Building a
Deployment Plan," suggests a way to estimate the size of the support staff for your organization's size and characteristics.
You need to develop a training strategy for your rollout team, the ongoing support staff, and end users. Some of the questions people often have include, "Is on-the-job training enough?" and "Can Notes be self-taught?" The answer to
both these questions is yes. Notes can be self-taught. Most people using Notes on the job eventually catch on. However, a price must be paid. Depending on the person, the price of skipping formal training varies from a longer learning curve to permanently
lower productivity.
You must keep in mind that Notes isn't a finished application. Notes, as shipped, is virtually useless for anything other than e-mail. It differs quite markedly from other desktop personal-productivity applications like Word, Excel, 1-2-3, etc. Notes is
a tool for developing applications. It integrates several features such as e-mail, an application builder, and security into a single package. Notes has a considerably larger scope than a personal productivity application. When people teach themselves
Notes, there is a real tendency to view Notes as an extension of something they already know, whether the user is an application developer, network administrator, or someone familiar with e-mail. People that skip formal training may never quite grasp the
power of the integrated feature set that Notes provides. One result of allowing self-teaching is that Notes often ends up being used only as an e-mail package. You can install Notes, but you cannot force people to use it. Proper training can empower users,
allowing them to use Notes confidently with a very short learning curve.
Training your end users empowers your end users. Training them in the various applications for which Notes can be used allows them to contribute ideas more readily than if they don't go through training. The ideas contributed by properly trained end
users will easily make up the cost of training. Don't skip training. Take the time to evaluate the training requirements and develop a training plan for each class of users and each geographic location.
The first step in developing your training strategy is to assess the current skill level in your organization. Not all corporations need the same training. You need to know who needs training. Develop a list of end users, administrators, and application
developers. You need to determine the current level of expertise for each person. Are your end users already familiar with a graphical desktop? How long have users been using a graphical environment? Have your users ever been involved in or contributed to
an application design in the past? You must determine who needs to be trained, what they need, where they are located, and when they need their training. The needs assessment for each person should include a list of skills to be learned and a time frame
for learning each skill. The needs for administrators will differ from those for end users.
Don't overlook training in non-Notes material. For end users, for example, you may need to offer training in desktop operating systems and applications that you integrate with Notes, such as word processors and spreadsheets. For your support staff,
consider updating training in the network protocols that you are using. Your application developers may need training in rapid-application-development methodologies, object-oriented databases, and client/server development.
At a minimum, after completing training end users should
Mobile users also will need to know how to
After users have some experience with Notes, you can consider an advanced class that teaches
Administrators need to know everything end-users know, plus
Application developers should have a basic understanding of everything an administrator knows, plus
Application developers must have a sense for the load their applications will place on a Notes server. Most applications can be built in many different ways, with most being CPU/memory/disk hogs. It's also useful when application developers have
knowledge of mainframe relational databases such as SQL Server so that they can properly judge whether Notes is the correct database platform for the problem at hand.
Develop a detailed list of who is to be trained from among all your end users, application developers, network administrators, and support engineers. To determine what each administrator or application developer needs to learn, compare the current skill
level to the job description for that position. For end users, the goal is to be able to use the specific applications that your rollout team will develop.
The location of your users is another critical aspect in planning your training. Remote users require a different training strategy than headquarters users. Whether you decide it's worth the expense of flying them in for a day or two of training at a
central site, or use some kind of automated training, training of remote users is likely to be more expensive and require more planning than training for your central headquarters staff.
After you have an assessment of your training needs, you must determine which of the available training options you will use.
For your administrators and application developers, you can rely on the standard training materials published by Lotus. Self-paced training throughout the deployment process often is appropriate, using computer-based training combined with hands-on
experience. We do recommend that application developers who have a background in relational database design go through the training before they start to experiment with developing Notes applications. Notes is definitely not a relational database, and
developers will be very frustrated if they think about it as if it were.
For remote training, you have the option of using standard computer-based training from Notes or from another training organization. You also can develop screen cams (recordings of someone using Notes) of your applications and distribute those to remote
locations. Screen Cam 2 is a product that allows you to record your desktop and add voice annotations.
Lastly, don't forget to consider using Notes itself to support your training efforts. You can use Notes to schedule your training efforts, track equipment and rooms available for training, track successful completion of training, distribute
post-training reviews and comments, and for follow-up in the weeks after the initial installation and training.
Check the Lotus Partners catalog for a nearly complete listing of all the Notes training centers in your area. Authorized education centers are required to keep certified Notes trainers on staff. These centers should be very enthusiastic and willing to
customize their training for your end users.
Training for executives often takes the form of customized hand-holding. Each executive is assigned a person from the rollout team or ongoing support staff. The executive calls that person directly whenever he has a question. That person is responsible
for going to the executive's office, demonstrating applications, and answering any questions for the executive. Even with an executive's busy schedule, there are definite advantages to having them attend some regular training meetings, even if only for
half a day. As Notes has the potential to dramatically change the way people do their jobs, one of the largest problems is resistance to change. Seeing executives participating in the training is one way of emphasizing the importance of making Notes work
throughout the organization. Seeing executives take time from a busy schedule to sit in training is a particularly effective way of emphasizing the importance that the organization is placing on Notes.
Executives in particular should get some background in using groupware to change collaborative processes. Redesigning collaborative processes goes beyond normal process reengineering. Make sure that your executive training includes some coverage of this
topic.
For end users, the most important thing is to coordinate the training and installation of Notes on their desktops. You want to minimize the amount of time end users spend in the classroom. One way to do that is to make sure that the end-user training is
customized to the applications that that end user is actually going to be using. One half day to one full day should be adequate for most end users.
Users should receive training within 48 hours of having Notes installed on their desktops. You should develop a complete schedule for each person, showing when you expect Notes to be installed on his desktop, and plan to train him within 48 hours either
before or after installation. This scheme keeps users productive and increases the value of your training dollar.
Proper scheduling is important enough that you should have some kind of carrot/stick approach to get users to attend training. Take attendance at your training sessions and require people to attend the full training. Don't distribute their user IDs
until they have completed their training. This is one way to emphasize the importance of completing the Notes training and making sure that each person completes the training.
Of course, the support staff, administrators, and application developers should receive training as early as possible in the rollout of Notes.
Notes Release 4.0 has more than enough new features to justify a half-day session for end users. Administrators and application developers should get updated copies of CBT courses. Lotus has included a special help database for current Notes users. If
you are looking for a menu selection and can't find it, use the Release 3 Menu Finder (available under the Help menu).
At the beginning of Chapter 5, "Building a Deployment Plan," we noted that one of the key elements of any successful project is being well connected to information sources. What that means with Notes is putting together a proper support plan.
You should plan where you will get information on an ongoing basis. Possibilities are CompuServe with the Lotus Communication forum (Go LotusC), the World Wide Web sites for Lotus and Iris (http://www.lotus.com and http://www.iris.com), and the Lotus knowledge base. The Lotus knowledge base is a collection of questions and answers from the Notes support staff that is available on CD for an annual fee. Check with Lotus for their
current offerings for their support programs. There are several levels of automated support from which you can choose, including a fax back service, phone support where you can call in and report bugs, and going through consultants or outsourcing your
support. Going through consultants or outsourcing is a good strategy for many organization in dealing with difficult network problems and modem problems, and can be a cost-effective alternative with mission-critical applications.
As a final note in developing your support strategy, let's talk about automated support. Automated support is any support delivered without intervention by or direct contact with another human being. This includes the fax-back service offered by Lotus,
CompuServe's forum, and so on. Automated support is cost effective for dealing with common problems, but you should not rely on this type of support to solve all your problems; even if you have a problem that someone else has had, it is often difficult to
determine if that is actually the case.
The next level of support is phone support provided by Lotus. This is a paid source of support, and Lotus offers several levels of support for application developers and administrators where they work with a technician at Lotus to solve their particular
problem. There are several phone support programs. Telephone support is appropriate for questions on simple installations and usage of Notes, including basic LotusScript programming questions.
The highest level of supportone that you should consider for mission-critical applications or large, complex enterprise-wide applicationsis retaining consultants or outsourcing your support altogether. Even if you are not outsourcing support
for your complete client/server network, you can outsource complete support for your Notes installation, including the administrative and support roles. Or you can simply retain a consultant for when you have problems that your in-house support staff can't
handle.
Before rolling out the first pilot application, you should develop and have available an in-house knowledge base accessible to all users. This is essentially a discussion database that holds common questions and answers that you have encountered while
developing the first Notes applications. Notes is shipped with a database template (discuss4.ntf) that you can use to create this database. The content of this database will be different for each organization.
There are two approaches to Notes application development that can be adopted by organizations. One extreme is that anyone is allowed to create a database, and the other is that only application developers from the IS staff can create databases. It's
certainly possible to take an approach between these extremes.
Your choice of application-development strategy will be determined in large part by the culture in your organization. However, when considering what level of control you should have over application development, you should take into account these facts:
You should start out with the following set of guidelines and decide after the initial pilot is in production whether to allow greater flexibility:
Another aspect of your application development strategy is which tools you need to support. You certainly have a very large number of application-development tools from which to choose, including the Notes Interface builder with LotusScript, the old
Lotus Notes Release 3.x macro language, the Notes C++ API, and Visual Basicto name just a few leading contenders. There are certainly more tools available than any one support staff can reliably support.
Choosing the tool set that you want to support is a matter of deciding what types of applications you need to build and matching up the tools to those applications. For example, the great majority of applications can be built using the application
builder that comes integrated with Notes. You can develop quite complex applications using the forms and view builder and LotusScript. For some details on using this method, see Chapter 16, "Administering Notes Servers." The primary use for the
Notes C API interface is to build custom links to other systems, including your corporate database systems. There are already products available that link Notes to Oracle, SQL Server, and other relational database systems. If you cant find a product
that links Notes directly to your corporate database system, you should investigate exporting Notes data to a common format such as ASCII text, and then importing these files into your corporate systems. There are tools such as Zmerge from Granite Software
(508-634-3200) that can automate the import and export of ASCII text and a variety of other formats into and out of Notes.
The last key element of your application-development strategy is the standard operating procedure for rolling out new applications. In order to enforce any standards, you need an authorized method for getting an application from development through
testing and into production. You also need to set up guidelines for how an application already in production gets updated. We recommend that application developers not directly alter production applications. Administrators must be responsible for
installing all new databases, whether they are developed by the IS staff or end users. Having an administrator be responsible for installing all Notes databases on a production domain ensures that
We recommend that your rollout strategy for new applications involve at least several days' testing in a test domain before having those changes rolled out to a production domain, and that your administrators be responsible for updating all existing
applications. Although administrators are responsible for installing applications, application developers will inevitably be involved in installing large or important applications.
If you have read between the lines in the previous sections on developing a support strategy, developing a training strategy, and developing an application-development strategy, you can tell that Notes has a requirement for close cooperation between the
various groups within your IS organization. In particular, there is a need for a good working relationship between your application developers and your support engineers and administrative staff. Without a good working relationship, it will be far more
difficult to develop and maintain Notes at a reasonable cost.
Notes is meant to support quick, easy communication between people. A great place to start is with the IS organization that is supporting Notes!
A close working relationship starts with the managers of the two organizations and requires that the application developers and administrators have at least some understanding of the other person's job. It doesn't mean that an application developer
needs to know all the standard steps involved in certifying a new user; however, an application developer should have some feel for the amount of work he is going to generate for support staff if he structures an access control list a certain way. An
application developer should also develop some empathy for the workload caused by upgrading an application. Likewise, an administrator should have some understanding of what goes into designing and implementing a Notes application for use across multiple
organizational units. A Notes administrator should have some basic abilities to build specialized views for his own use.
It certainly is true that nature hates a vacuum. What's true for nature and air is also true for companies and information. Any gap in information will be filled with rumors. If you are doing a large deployment of Notes, people will talk about it,
whether they have any actual knowledge or not, so you might as well provide them with accurate information on your Notes deployment. Your information should include the current status of the project, as well as document the successes in an optimistic
manner and communicate the benefits that the organization is seeing from Notes. Accurate information is far more likely to generate enthusiasm and overcome resistance than are rumors.
The last paragraph goes to the heart of most resistance to Notes. Information is power. In some organizations, sharing information means losing power. If the last paragraph seems more like a good joke than a possibility in your company, then your Notes
deployment will not succeed unless you tackle people's resistance head-on. The best way to start is by setting a good example yourself.
Of course, you need to plan for and expect change. Why would you install Notes if you didn't intend to change the organization in some manner? However, the changes that Notes brings often go far beyond reengineering your business processes. When you
reengineer a business process, you need to design explicit steps needed to accomplish a task. The changes for which you must plan can be identified. You should know the people affected and what their new tasks are. Notes planning involves a far more
difficult task: identifying the flow of information within a company. You need to identify sources of information, common paths of information flow, and information users. This information can be critical in identifying probable sources of resistance
(information generators) and support (information users). Because of the informal nature of much information within a company, you may never be able to fully identify the information sources and users.
After installing Notes you can expect that
You should expect that, after installing Notes, information will tend to flow more horizontally, as workflow applications are implemented that automatically route data between departmental units rather than up and down departmental reporting structures.
As users from multiple business units participate in joint-application-design sessions, there might be for the first time an active working partnership formed between units that have been in conflict in the past. Expect information to be created at more
spots within your organization. Expect users to begin contributing ideas and making suggestions to the IS organization more than they may have in the past. Expect your IS organization to need to become far more responsive and creative in their responses
than they might have had to be in the past. Expect your executives, through e-mail and shared data, to become more visible and accessible to the people throughout your organization. You need to communicate these changes as you see them coming and discuss
them openly in your organization.
If information within your organization currently tends to flow from the top down and/or is rigidly controlled, you should plan on two to five years before Notes is fully implemented (for medium and large organizations). This time will be required to
overcome resistance within the organization.
Preparing your organization for the changes that Notes will bring is the key element in successfully deploying Notes. These are the key steps in preparing your organization:
But most of all, plan for and expect resistance to change. Notes will change the relative power of people within your organization, as well as the way information is generated and used. Overcoming resistance caused by these factors will take visible
commitment from executives and a strong role model. The key morals for this chapter are: everyone gets trained, and everyone gets involved.