Engaging consultants to meet short term technical requirements is a time-honored management strategy. When the consultant leaves, and the requirement reappears, you can find yourself in the same place all over again. Consider a different strategy for meeting your Unified Communications requirements—Mentoring.
Challenge
Have you ever engaged outside help for planning, deployment or operational tasks and wondered how the contractor fixed your problems and what exactly is in your network?
Our first mentoring customer presented us with this challenge. They needed more than a training class to feel confident about rolling out the latest Cisco features. In response to this customer need, Convergent Communications created a technology mentoring program which resulted in a very successful solution and a satisfied customer. We now offer a targeted program for Cisco Unified Communications customers and the Cisco partners who service them.
You can use Convergent Communications’ Unified Communications Mentoring program to collaboratively solve planning, implementation, operations or optimization of your network. Convergent Communications’ world class mentors bring active production experience and exceptional training skills to bear so that you not only resolve your problems but learn how to do it yourself. Where other consultants may feed you, our collaborative consulting teaches you how to fish using authorized Cisco content and best practices.
Why you need Unified Communications Mentoring
Your enterprise communications environment has grown in complexity over the years with the explosion of devices and connectivity demands. In addition to basic phone/fax service and voice messaging, requirements such as mobile clients, unified messaging, instant messaging, collaboration, conferencing and video place demands on the knowledge and skills required of your engineering team. Your management understands that ineffective communications reduces corporate profitability and look to you to ensure corporate communication needs are met. Unified Communications mentoring addresses all components of Cisco’s Unified Communications solutions and provides assistance to make you more successful at your job.
Managers use mentoring in lieu of training because it’s targeted and more cost effective than sending staff out for off the shelf training, or even buying custom training. Your engineers are being trained in your actual environment. For you, it’s cost-effective staff development. For your engineers, targeted mentoring allows them to efficiently get their job done and bringing their unified communications skills current.
Convergent Communications Unified Communications mentoring is right for you if:
Planning and Design
- Your company has decided to implement Unified Communications and you need to provide due diligence evaluation of competing designs
Implementation
- You are an engineering manager with a team of inexperienced IP telephony engineers and very anxious manager who must have a working phone system at cutover.
- You are a new engineer deploying Cisco Unified Communications solutions and must get a working solution within a fixed time and budget
- You want to deploy new Cisco features such presence, mobility, or unified messaging and your team has limited experience with designing, implementing and troubleshooting these features in a real environment
Operation and Optimization
- Expected cost benefits for your Unified Communications implementation are not being realized. A Dial Plan verification will insure the path expected is the path selected and identify optimization alternatives.
- You have to support your company’s Cisco IP telephony solution and want to understand what the outside contractor just did to solve your top 10 issues.
- You require a system upgrade to avoid obsolescence, reduce costs, or increase feature capabilities and your team needs help planning the upgrade, executing the upgrade, and implementing new features in the least disruptive manner
- You must document a newly acquired company’s Unified Communications implementation for ISO 9000 compliance
Benefits
Increased Management Satisfaction
Our service will allow you to significantly increase the likelihood of on time on budget deployment with fewer voice problems leading to a satisfied management team.
Reduction in Time
Your engineers will spend less time trying to puzzle through the problem and focus on guided implementation of the solution with mentoring and on the spot tutorials.
Reduction in Costs
A team of engineers with only classroom experience will take significantly longer to deploy and efficiently support CUCM clusters, gateways, gatekeepers, messaging and other unified communications components than a team with immediate coaching and mentoring.
Increased Staff Skills
Timely targeted training reduces time to completion and engineer skills, understanding and retention increases. Engineers are more pro-active in recognizing and addressing future problems.
Increased Staff Satisfaction
Keeping IT staff up to date on the latest technology is paramount in staff retention. Engineers experiencing expert coaching are “on top” of Cisco’s best practices in Unified Communications.
Why Convergent Communications for Mentoring
A successful Unified Communications mentor brings both technical competence and the ability to teach. Convergent Communications’ Unified Communications Mentoring is provided by highly rated instructors who also have extensive field experience. This unique combination of in-field networking experience with knowledge of how engineers learn produces consistent high quality results. Our mentors embrace your environment and how Unified Communications fit into your corporate mission.
Click here for a sample listing of Unified Communications areas we can address.
Convergent Communications is a full service training organization with a ten year history of delivering training solutions to Fortune 500 companies. Convergent Communications has developed and delivered courses that cover the technology deployment Life Cycle: Preparation, Planning, Design, Implementation, Operation and Optimization (PPDIOO). This track record insures that Convergent Communications mentors can analyze your needs and create custom training material to support the coaching process. We bring a deep track record of developing over 40 courses for Cisco organizations.
Click here for a history of Convergent Communications experience in the evolution of Cisco’s Unified Communications competency areas.
Contact Us
Convergent Communication’s mentoring service will provide you with targeted custom authorized Cisco training in conjunction with on-site engineering support to deploy Cisco’s Unified communications solutions.
Contact a Convergent Communications Education Consultant.
Our Education Consultants are trained to answer you questions and understand your requirements. Unified Communications experts are available to define a solution based on your needs, a solution that works.
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