Project Plan

Project Plan

A detailed, up-to-date project plan is vital to the success of the project. The project manager should use the project plan to monitor costs, manage project staff, follow progress against milestones and track key dependencies such as hardware, storage, training, licenses and certificates so that they can be addressed before they can become bottlenecks. The project plan should be regularly distributed between project team members to ensure that everybody is aware of progress as well as remaining tasks.

At the start of the project, only plan for the Assess phase. You won’t be able to plan for the Design or Deploy phases yet because you’ll need a better understanding of the FlexCast models, capabilities,

user groups and applications required. After the roadmap stage, update the project plan to include separate design and deploy activities for each user group identified, ordered by priority. This will

help to ensure that the business receives maximum value from their investment as soon as possible and allow infrastructure to be built out in manageable IT projects that minimize risk and maximize the chance for project success. 

A sample project plan, created in Microsoft Project 2010 format, accompanies this document. A high-level overview is shown below:

Note: Some of the tasks in the project plan template have been scheduled to occur in parallel because it is assumed that multiple project team members are available. All activities, resources and scheduling within the sample project plan should be reviewed prior to starting your project.

XenDesktop Methodology

Methodology

The Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook follows the Citrix Consulting methodology. A proven methodology that has been successfully employed across thousands of desktop virtualization

projects. Each phase includes guidance on the important questions to ask, what tools to use and tips to help you succeed. The Citrix Consulting methodology consists of five phases:

1. Define – Builds the business case for desktop virtualization by creating a high-level project roadmap, prioritizing activities and estimating storage and hardware requirements.

2. Assess – Key business drivers are rated so that work effort can be prioritized accordingly. In addition, the current environment is reviewed for potential problems and to identify use cases for the

project. This information will be used to set the direction of the Citrix deployment, upgrade, or expansion.

3. Design – Define architecture required to satisfy key business drivers and success criteria identified during the assess phase. Topics such as environment scalability, redundancy and high availability are addressed.

4. Deploy – During the deploy phase, FlexCast Infrastructure is installed and configured as described in the design phase. All components of the infrastructure should be thoroughly unit and regression

tested before users are provided with access to the environment.

5. Monitor – Define architectural and operational processes required to maintain the production environment.

The Citrix Consulting methodology follows an iterative Assess > Design > Deploy process for each major initiative of your project. In doing so, your organization is left with tangible improvements to

the environment at the end of each engagement. For example, high priority user groups can progress through the assess, design and deploy phases earlier than other user groups

Note: The Virtual Desktop Handbook provides content on the Assess and Design phases of the Citrix Consulting methodology. Additional phases will be released soon