Team Resources for a Successful Intel vPro Project

The following is a summary list of key project team roles for successful Intel vPro projects. This is a summary from experiences based on real-world engagements with real-world customers.

Some items may seem obvious - yet sometimes oversight on the "obvious" is what leads to unfortunate realities.

Open to input from community.

• Project Sponsor and Champion - The executive sponsor with the vision which may have produced or confirmed by the roles listed blow. This individual helps to obtain "buy-in" from other business units, has the insight and foresight to navigate through calm or troubled waters, and understands the potential risks and associated mitigations. Although not a day-to-day project player - this role is still critical.
• Project Management - Coordination of resources, schedules, expectations, and so forth. A key role for any successful project, which often has representation both inside and outside a production environment.
• Business Process Change Management - Intel vPro provides extended reach of an Altiris environment with out-of-band capabilities. Understanding the current and future business processes and IT governance is key. Understanding the capabilities of Intel vPro and how it will augment and extend the environment is key. Understanding the desired future state of the environment and associated metrics is paramount. Together - how these will affect a "day in the life" of a HelpDesk technician, Onsite support technician, IT administrator, end user, and so forth is a matter of technical training and understanding... and business process assessment, re-evaluation, and application of changes critical to project success.
• IT Operations understanding - Intel vPro is focused on the security and manageability of the client systems. It leverages many of the infrastructural capabilities which exist as a foundation to build on. Understanding the impacts, interactions, troubleshooting, and so forth is important technologically. Understanding change management to an environment, interdependencies, and so forth is also important.
• Altiris and Intel vPro Technological Understanding - Understanding the usage models requires some technical experience with the platform. Combined with the roles above, along with the functionality of Altiris Client Management Suite (RTSM, OOBM, DS, etc) this project team member is critical.
• Principal and Strategic Architects - Individual or team with a holistic understanding of the current and future state of the environment, upcoming technological advances, and so forth. Perhaps a superset of previously stated roles. This role\team assists in making visions become reality. They often participate in setting the strategic direction, vision, "marketing" for adoption of key technologies and capabilities, and early pilots within a production environment. Lastly - this time will have contacts and knowledge across security, networking, servers.

Again - please comment on other key roles for a successful Altiris OOBM with Intel vPro Technology project. I have used my own names for the roles - realizing that some production environments have sufficient internal resources to handle this, while others bring in the collaborative resources needed for a particular project.

Customers with a few hundred activated clients exist today, and they are planning (and in some cases already executing) for tens of thousands of clients... some even looking to support more than that. Again - the above roles are summary of what has made these projects successful... and we look forward to more succcesses.

The opinions expressed on this site are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or strategies of Intel Corporation or its worldwide subsidiaries.