Cloud Adoption Plan Step Four – Using Outside Expertise

If you’ve been meticulously following your cloud adoption plan, you should have successfully sold the idea to your management and your team. Hopefully, you now have a few wins using the cloud as well so that everyone agrees it is a useful tool. You have set a good foundation for success – now it’s time to build on it and more fully implement your vision on a larger scale. The best way to make that happen is with outside experts who have a proven track record with cloud computing. As the very first article in this series stated, you are at a critical point now. Any hiccup in the execution of your plan could cause the few remaining critics to get louder and chip away at your support. If you execute this step correctly, you will have nothing to worry about. Picking the right transition professional will help make the completion of your plan nearly effortless.

Past Experience

Understanding the need for outside expertise is one thing, but what exactly should you look for when choosing the right ally? First and foremost, you need experience. The company you choose needs to have documented success in implementing the cloud at an enterprise level and ideally in your industry. Ask for a detailed description of past projects to ensure they have successfully implemented cloud-based solutions for prior clients and ask for a list of references. Don’t hesitate to contact those references and, when you do, ensure that their responses will remain anonymous. Make sure that you engage your transition team in these discussions. This must be a group decision and it needs to be as objective as possible.

Training

Part of this step needs to be staff training so that your team can more effectively use the cloud. Before selecting your outside experts, you need to ensure they have a well-established training program. Ask to see what sort of training they can provide concrete examples. No one likes formal training, so it is best to make sure that whatever program they can provide is engaging, as hands-on as possible, and able to provide immediately applicable skills. Top cloud consulting companies will have no problem meeting this requirement.

Ownership

This point is a little counter-intuitive, but from an execution standpoint, your outside partner must be willing and able to take full ownership of your cloud during this time. That doesn’t mean that your team becomes disengaged. It simply means that you rely on your partner’s expertise to turn your vision into a simple, elegant solution. This allows your team the freedom to focus on learning the new skills they will need to use the new tools the cloud will create. You can focus on your own internal processes while the day-to-day operation and expansion of the cloud environment is handled by the professionals.

Support

You have read it before, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat that cloud implementation is a cultural shift and cultural shifts take a while – months to years – to be fully realized. Your outside partner must be able to support your transition after you retake ownership. If they are experienced, they will know that most cultural shifts follow the basic pattern of the grief curve. Initially, everyone is energetic about the change and it is successful (think early wins from step three), but over time the support wanes because full commitment is hard and takes more work than the old ways of doing business. It takes time to get “good” at the new skills that are required. The right experts will anticipate this pattern and help you successfully overcome it.

If you have made it to this point, your odds of success are good. You have internal support and early wins. For the most part, everyone has bought into the transition and your company should now have a clear vision of where it wants to go. Choosing the right outside expertise, using the criteria described above, will help you seal overall success. The key is to choose an expert who is willing to partner with you and support your transition through to its completion.