T aking an Incremental Approach to your UC Strategy

Embarking on a UC journey means that you’re making the decision to change some of the ways that you do business. While you may be targeting only small process changes, it is critical to do your due diligence. This way, you understand where you are now on your path to UC as well as the steps required to get the business results you desire.

TELUS’ UC philosophy relies on two key best practices – the seven-step approach and the M.U.S.T. model. The seven-step approach focuses on the critical elements of the UC strategy from discovery through to adoption. The M.U.S.T. model illustrates the continuum of evolving UC capabilities. By taking an incremental approach, you can move your organization from efficiency to productivity and from productivity to leadership by transforming how your people work, respond and collaborate.

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The seven-step approach

UC is more than a specific capability, feature or functionality. It is a strategy that targets improvements in communication and collaboration to enable improved business results.

TELUS takes a best practices approach to Unified Communications, which simplifies implementations and helps you leverage existing investments. The seven-step approach includes:

 

• Discovery – Experience UC capabilities in action to identify potential business process improvements.
• Business Requirements – Scope top priorities, identify key stakeholders, actions and timelines.
• Technology Strategy – Determine the appropriate stage of the phased UC approach.
• Business Case – Calculate potential ROI (financial and strategic).
• Proof of Concept – Test your specific UC solution to gather proprietary metrics for building a business case.
• Design and Deployment – Deploy UC capabilities to select functional teams/departments to validate the business case with user experience and feedback.
•  Adoption – Best practices, customer checklists and training.

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MUST Model

The type of UC solutions that you need, the level of integration that’s required and the approach that you take depends on:

• How you do business
• Your current technology
• What you want to achieve

The TELUS MUST model breaks down UC adoption into four phases:

• Migrate – to an IP network for increased flexibility to work anytime, anywhere.
• Unify – integrate various forms of communication to control and manage inbound and outbound communication more effectively.
• Stimulate – achieve seamless communications with customers and suppliers
• Transcend – adopt new business models, enhance customer service and streamline business processes

The MUST model maps out a UC evolution path – moving from efficiency to productivity and from productivity to leadership. It aligns UC capabilities (communications and collaboration) with business benefits to enable incremental process improvements.  With more effective processes, your people can work better and respond faster, enabling them to achieve critical business goals including service excellence, cost savings and profitability.