Stage 1: Planning the Business Implementation

The planning stage is critical to the success of the implementation. In this stage, you gather requirements and make clear decisions about how to define the structures that your teams need.

The time you dedicate up front to thoughtfully plan your implementation will pay off many times over during the rest of the implementation and throughout the life of AAI in your organization.

Prerequisites and Resourcing

Before starting the steps in this stage, ensure that you have done the following:

• Read through the topics for all stages of the business implementation
• Provided for the necessary technical and resource requirements. For information, see Prerequisites for the Business Implementation.

For this stage, you, the business area coordinator are the main person working through the steps. Additionally, throughout this stage, you will need the input of your scheduler experts, analysts, business process owners, and managers for the processes and schedulers that you are implementing in AAI.

Step 1a: Gather Requirements

Take time to answer the questions under each item in the list that follows. Collect input from your teams to get a comprehensive list of requirements. You are looking for what is important to people from their automation platforms, now and in the future. You will notice some overlap in the following items. This is intentional. Asking yourself questions from different perspectives helps you discover hidden requirements.

• Users

  Who are the people and user groups who will work with AAI? Who will consume its output? Who are the non-technical people who need to follow or consume the execution data without understanding the inner workings?

  Who are the experts on the scheduler teams for the schedulers that will feed data into AAI? Identify key users and experts for each functional area, scheduler and business area.

• Schedulers

  Which schedulers will feed data into AAI?

  Consider the schedulers that you want to integrate into AAI now as well as those you anticipate adding in the future. For information, see Workload Automation / Scheduler Integration through Connectors.

• Processes

  Which business areas, applications, and key processes do I want to support and visualize in AAI? What things do our teams pay attention to when they monitor executions? 

  What information is important during hand-offs between operations shifts and teams? What do different teams need to share with each other and communication channels and language do they use with each other?

• SLAs

  Which are the most important SLAs? Who are my key external clients who depend on timely executions? What are the processes for the services that my organization needs to deliver for those clients? What kinds of success criteria are measured in those SLAs?

  Which internal groups depend on successful and timely executions of IT processes? What are the processes that these groups depend on to succeed?

  Asking these questions helps you identify the jobstreams that you will require.

• Jobstreams

  A jobstream groups the jobs from start to finish of a process that lead to a final, target job which results in an output or final state that is important to your teams in some way. These target jobs are usually associated with a known SLA of some kind. Ask yourself, what are those target jobs on each scheduler? Who is interested in them? For information, see Jobstreams and SLAs.

  Initially, you need only two to three key job processes for each scheduler. You let AAI create a jobstream for the target job of each of these processes, and then you can use these jobstreams to run through the initial test iterations. Later, after testing and adjusting, you will need a comprehensive list of target jobs for the processes that you want to see in AAI.

• Views

  To know how to organize and present targeted execution data to different user groups, ask yourself, what kind of data do my users need to see—while monitoring, at the start of their shifts, when trying to resolve issues or analyze performance? What subsets of jobstreams does each user need to see? This information will be the basis of defining business areas, filters, and dashboards for targeted scopes of job execution data.

• Reports

  What reports are currently being produced for the jobs on the schedulers that we will support in AAI? Who needs these reports? What information do they need from them? Who supplies these reports? How often are they needed?  Where can I gather the currently produced reports and their data parameters? What other information might they want that they cannot currently get?

• Business objectives

  What are the key business objectives of your management at this time? Which metrics are they looking at? What kind of data do you need to extract, aggregate and abstract from AAI to measure and prove performance of, for example SLA fulfillment?

  • Wish List
    

    This is a good time to make room for the future beyond this immediate implementation. What problems should implementing AAI solve? Where is the organization in its workload automation maturity model? How can we position ourselves for the next stage?

    More immediately, what are users asking for that currently cannot be provided? What are managers asking for? What are customers asking for?

Step 1b: Identify Key People

Identify the key people to work through the implementation with you as part of your implementation team. These people might also be people who will later take on permanent roles as experts in their area of responsibility. For example, scheduler administrators who can help define requirements might later become the AAI jobstream and business area administrators.

Step 1c: Identify the Relevant AAI Features

Parallel to gathering requirements, start to learn about the AAI features and capabilities in more detail so that you can identify the features that will be relevant for your teams. You might want to invite the key people whom you identified earlier to also learn about and identify useful features in AAI. Include people from each scheduler team in your automation environment.

With your team, learn about the following and gather a list of features that might be relevant to you to fulfill your requirements and support how you work:

• The jobstream options
• SLA options
• Alert types and notification options
• Dashboard types and customization options
• AAI report types
• Filter options

To get a good overall understanding of AAI, the best place to begin is with the videos in Broadcom's AAI education courses. For information, see Free Online Courses.

Step 1d: Define the Organizing Structures

With the list of requirements that you have gathered and your new understanding of the AAI features, you will have a comprehensive view to help you decide on the structures, standards and organizing principles that you will require in AAI . Now you are ready to define your implementation strategy by doing the following:

• Define naming conventions for the following:
  • Business areas
  • Jobstreams
  • Filters
  • Dashboards
  • Reports
  Important !

  Doing this well is a crucial step to data organization that serves your organization. For more information, see Guidelines for Naming Conventions.

• Define your strategy for alerts

• Identify the following feature options that are relevant and most useful for your users:
  • Jobstream options
  • Filters on business areas, jobstreams, and jobs
  • Types of dashboards
  • Report types, users, and frequencies

You do not have to get it right on the first try. You can modify your decisions in the next stage, when you test these structures.

In the initial implementation, it's better to start with solid naming conventions, business areas and some key jobstreams and to implement just the AAI features and options that are most relevant to your teams. Later, as the teams settle in with the new tool, you can refine and expand your original definitions and bring further features and options into use.

Step 1e: Plan for Training

You will need to provide training for users in the next two stages in the implementation project. This includes training for the following:

• For testers during the testing stage
• For all users during the roll out in the production environment

For each stage and user group, you will need to provide some formal instruction as well as continued ad hoc support during the testing activities and in the initial period after the roll out.

Best Practices:

When planning the testing activities, consider the following:

• Use multiple training approaches

  Familiarize yourself with the Broadcom learning resources, which you can find in the following places:

  • In education offerings: To get a good, overall understanding of AAI capabilities, use the free, online education for Automation Analytics & Intelligence. For information, see Free Online Courses.
  • In this documentation: Start with the topics in the introductory sections, that is, see Welcome to Automation Analytics & Intelligence and Getting Started with AAI, which directs users to further information related to their responsibilities based on their user role.
    

  Using those and your own expertise about your company, teams, and schedulers make training strategy with a mix of formalized in-person training for groups, one-on-one training, or self-learning. In all cases, take advantage of Broadcom resources to include them in your training or to direct people to.

• Provide a playground environment

  Using a playground or test environment is essential to help people learn by freely playing around with the tool themselves. For the best results, make sure that the testers and the jobstreams for the test playground are compatible. That is, include the jobstreams for processes that your testers are already familiar with, or the other way around, choose testers who are familiar with the processes in the playground. Also, choose jobstreams that run during the time that the testers will be working in the playground.

• Develop a group of experts

  Identify key people for each scheduler, each operational shift, and other key user teams. Provide these people with more in depth training and provide it earlier to develop them as team experts that are equipped to support their teams.

• Provide different levels of training

  Everyone needs to know the key AAI concepts and the basics of finding their way around the new tool and have a brief overview of all of AAI functional areas. Beyond that, it's best to continue with separate, detailed training that is targeted to different groups about their areas of responsibility. For example, provide operations teams with detailed training about monitoring executions, dealing with alerts and jobstreams, and provide analysts and process owners details about dashboards, reporting, and analysis.

  Topics for general training include:

  • Logging in, navigating, and an overview of the different parts of AAI
  • Key concepts, especially those that are unique to AAI, such as the jobstream, the critical path, predictive capabilities
  • Setting user preferences
  • Common functions, such as filtering

Next step:

Stage 2: Testing the Business Implementation