Convergent Communications Inc. - Deploy Assure Curriculum Planning

Convergent Communications, Inc. - A Cisco Systems Learning Partner

Deploy Assure Curriculum Planning

What is Deploy Assure?

	DEPLOY ASSURE INFORMATION REQUEST FORM

Convergent Communications Deploy Assure Curriculum Planning

What is Deploy Assure?

If you manage an IT group, you know that the right skills for the job will reduce cost, time and frustration. As technologies have become more complex and corporate dependency on 24x7 mission critical networks and applications increases, it is essential that your engineering staff have the right skills to get their job done. Best effort with existing knowledge may no longer be good enough.

Deploy Assure is a methodology to ensure successful integration, maintenance, and management of your technology deployments. The goal of Deploy Assure is to guarantee that each specific job function within an organization gets the exact training it requires.

Deploy Assure saves your corporation time and money. Significant production and support time is saved because less time is needed in the classroom learning unnecessary skills. New skills are validated in the classroom to reduce the cost of unnecessary network or system downtime due to incomplete skills for the job. As technologies become more complex and corporate dependency on 24x7 mission critical networks and applications increases the need for skilled employees who can get the job done is now paramount.

A key pre-requisite to this assurance comes from defining the skills required to competently fill a job role and then identifying gaps between those required skills and existing knowledge. Knowing this gap, we can then create a targeted training plan that bridges the gap for your staff. This reduces time out the field and focuses your training budget to build an engineer that will be highly effective in your business. The Convergent Communications Deploy Assure Curriculum Planning service provides this analysis and planning essential to developing your technical staff.

Once a solution is identified, Convergent Communications can develop custom courseware and hands-on labs and deliver custom offerings or off-the-shelf courses if appropriate. Skill levels can be assessed before and after the training to gauge the effectiveness of the training solution.

Benefits

Clearly identifying needs, planning and delivering a solution offers these benefits:

Increase skill proficiency

The suite of training will be designed to meet your technology needs. Increased focus on the skills used on the job while removing unnecessary training that is not required. Job proficiency will increase significantly.

Save on staff development costs

Targeted training solutions save training dollars by eliminating unnecessary classes along with associated travel and lost opportunity due to having engineers out of service.

Efficient network operations

Well-trained engineers result in more efficient network operations that better meet corporate objectives. The improved abilities of engineers will help to prevent common mistakes and resolve unanticipated problems.

Process

Convergent Communications offers a structured, proven process for developing focused training solutions.

Needs Analysis:
Convergent Communications begins by assessing your business initiatives and goals that your network supports. We also analyze the technical activities and organization that support your network.

Task Analysis:
We next list the tasks that support the technical activities and identify the functional groups and/or job roles assigned to perform those tasks. In examining the organizational structure in which technical activities and tasks are performed, we can roll-up individual job tasks and determine how they fit into that structure.

Gap Analysis:
Here we summarize task performance at functional group level and compare that with Cisco recommended practices and the requirements of your standard operating procedures, documenting gaps between the current and the desired state of task performance. Individual skill levels can be determined by detailed assessment surveys.

Curriculum Roadmap:
Once we identify training to address organizational performance gaps, we can prepare a curriculum roadmap. Around each functional area, we prescribe corrective action to help resolve skills gaps, resulting in a curriculum roadmap of training and knowledge transfer recommendations. Solutions may result in recommended off-the-shelf training products in public or private settings or customized training content delivered specifically for your staff. Proposed solutions usually feature hands-on lab-based training. Individual training plans are augmented with pre and post training tests.

Risk Assessment:
Once Convergent Communications completes the analysis phase, we can then assess the risk to your organization of not implementing the recommendations.

Deliverables

The Convergent Communications Deploy Assure Curriculum Planning service deliverables consist of providing a written report and delivering a presentation on crucial findings of the analysis, recommendations, and risk assessment.

Analysis Findings Report
Curriculum maps (with off-the-shelf and custom training solutions identified)

Convergent Communications will follow up the recommendations with proposals for development and delivery of the training curriculum. This offering is independent of the engagement for the planning service.

Success Stories

Local Government

Convergent Communications provided a Deploy Assurance Curriculum Plan for a local government IT department in support of its Cisco IP Telephony roll out. This organization was deploying Cisco VoIP in what was a legacy TDM voice organization and wanted to retrain its PBX operations team to support Cisco VoIP.

Convergent Communications was able to interview the management team and identify the operational tasks necessary to support the deployment to Level 2 support. We created pre-tests to cover data fundamentals, voice fundamentals and the Cisco IP Telephony skills deemed requirements to meet their operations staff needs.

Custom training was developed, building three courses that met their specific team needs. Once the training was delivered, assessments confirmed the training was successful.

Cisco ACCELERATE

Convergent Communications was engaged to rewrite the detailed Design Document for the Cisco’s Service Provider Voice ACCELERATE program. This project required an extensive gap analysis with a large group of SMEs under a tight delivery schedule. We used the gap analysis results to design a two-week training curriculum and then developed and ultimately delivered the training solution. As a result, dozens of Cisco systems engineers received skills training for the deployment of Cisco’s service provider voice solutions.

Analysis and Design in Course Development

Routinely, Convergent Communications performs analysis and design services for both Cisco courses and others produced in-house. For example, AVVID Troubleshooting and PBX Integration (AATPI) involved extensive interviews with Cisco TAC, field engineers, and advanced technology channel partners to design a lab intensive course that taught solutions to the most common and difficult voice troubleshooting problems. Cisco Unity Design and Networking 1.0 required a similar process for ascertaining the requirements necessary for design engineers to design appropriate Unity solutions and thus lower the incidence of TAC and CAP cases coming from poorly designed implementations.

Contact Us

For a review of how we can help maximize your training budget and provide the most effective training for your engineering staff contact your Convergent Communications Education Consultant at 301-565-0138, ext. 6030 or 1-800-963-4108.