This is the second and final part of a series. For the first part, click here.

Third Phase of a Mature AV Estate — Evolving the Stack

While our users will be pretty happy at this point, trouble is undoubtedly brewing. They are out there finding new software and functionality that they want to make use of, and we need to find ways to do that.

• Tablets all work well? CIO wants to deploy Alexa for Business so that we can control rooms via voice!
• TVs all work well? CMO is concerned that color rendering is not showing things accurately; they want a plan to calibrate TVs and find cameras that can also be calibrated.
• Or … more down to earth, there is a desire to start adding digital whiteboards to conference rooms. Whether that is using the native whiteboards of Microsoft or Zoom, or more extensive ones via Mural, or Miro, or … whatever.

When we have that stable environment and solid back-end, then the AV world moves into a “general maintenance” mode for the most part and the future becomes our biggest concern. On a regular basis, we will be hit with requests for features, new hardware, or just get tied up in our own desire to align with the fifth stage of the ITIL service lifecycle…

Continual Service Improvement

The reality is that when systems work well, users expect ever higher quality and better experiences. That system that had great sound last year suddenly sounds a bit muffled. Perhaps the cameras aren’t sharp enough or etc. etc. *Insert random concerns here.*

How do we deal with this? Well, the first thing is to be aware of the concerns. Do you ever notice how just about anything you do these days from returning a product to paying for your bill at Chili’s with those stupid tablets has a survey attached? This obsession with surveys is a direct effect of the attempt to always be improving. After all, we can’t attempt to improve what we aren’t aware of.

And how are we focusing on that? Back to previous statements — we need data! When VC calls end, we need to survey the participants. However, it is difficult to do this in a manner that asks a question that can be both actionable and informative to us in order to start tracking trends. Recently we decided that we no longer wanted the default survey question that Zoom adds after calls. We realized that it really wasn’t a useful question for us. But that leads to the next point.

We need to dig deep to figure out what we want to know. Turns out that there was an internal push to have fewer meetings and try to get our employees to pivot towards more asynchronous work. The more relevant question to ask here is more along the lines of “Was this meeting a good use of your time?”. Now this of course has NOTHING to do with the AV team, but it was a critical question in moving toward better use of time. Don’t forget: A mature environment is not just about the tech, it is also about HOW we meet and how we use our time. So, it absolutely fits the goals and is a great illustration of the evolving needs of the business from the AV team.

At a different organization in which I worked, we had a facilities survey that we sent out quarterly. And every time the results came in, I would pore over it and look for things to improve. After a few cycles of this, it was clear that we needed to both revamp the questions (they were just too vague) as well as create a sub-survey that we could send out to people with concerns about conference rooms (in order to probe their concerns a bit more deeply). Once we did that, the results that had previously suggested issues with the AV side of the conference rooms went away (for the most part) and other issues that were more facilities-related came to light. The biggest benefit was that we could now present evidence to management to obtain permission and funding to explore solutions for issues that we had identified.

One other thing we did was to task everyone in the AV team to sit in on two or three random meetings per month to take notes on HOW the room was used. See if there were hiccups in using the technology as well as if there were issues that were not getting back to us. This was tremendously helpful as it also helped to develop a deeper connection between the AV team and our users and to let them know that we really were invested in improving their experiences.

So the takeaway here is that in order to meet the needs of continual service improvement, we need to understand how rooms are used and ensure that we have constant feedback on our spaces.

By doing the above, it was clear that we needed to explore new technologies and new features in a way that gave us the flexibility to freestyle and allow employees to provide feedback on their usage. After all, some of them may have previously worked in environments with impressive meeting rooms, providing valuable insight. By bringing this feedback to our management, we all aligned on creating a room(s) in the main HQ building and then planned to follow up in our other large sites that would serve as a sandbox type of space where we could roll things in, test them and figure out what to do with them while never impacting our standard rooms. My director called it an “Innovation Conference Room.” This is the type of space that everyone needs. Non-reservable, but usable if open, heavily moderated to ensure that nobody tries to use it and fails, but constantly testing out new tools and techniques that will result in a better experience for all.

We had plans to take it a step further as well. In this day and age, (as I talked about in my last article about the conference experience versus the conference ROOM experience) it is not enough to just think about the equipment we put into conference rooms. We need to think long and hard about how we equip remote employees and executives. So we were taking the additional steps to set up different workstations with things like the Logi Dock (which isn’t just a dock if you have not looked at it; it has additional rather cool functions), The Neat Frame, and Jupiter Systems’ new Pana 34, and whatever else we found that we thought might make a difference for how employees could work remotely. The room is no longer the biggest part of the equation; for effective hybrid work, we have to test our personal equipment as well.

So now, we know what is happening in these rooms, we understand the issues that arise or we just get a request to improve some aspects. In order to move out of the sandbox and into a phase of deploying things, we need to understand one of the most important cornerstones of ITIL, which leads us to …

Change Management

The first rule of the Change Management Club is that ALL CHANGE IS BAD!!! OK, maybe not totally bad, but the ugly fact is that almost any change will affect some users in an adverse manner. As a result, we have to carefully plan how we validate, plan and deploy change. Now there is no need to go into depth here on this subject as there are already loads of resources out there that cover all the nuances of well-managed Change Management. However, I think it’s prudent to hit on a few of the high points.

1. Plan. No matter what is changing, a change plan needs to be constructed. In many cases for no other reason than having steps already documented as to how to revert back out of that plan. Even the best plans can go sideways once they are deployed, so it is crucial to understand how to back things out quickly if needed.
2. Communicate. This one cannot be understated. You have to email them; you have to put signs on doors, TVs, control panels, drop them on desks. You have to do everything you can to let folks that will be affected that you are making some changes. The more communication, the smoother it will all go. And no matter how small the change may seem, it is impossible to predict how it will affect all users. At the very least, a robust and well-executed communication plan can at least help in showing the most stubborn of users that you made every attempt to let them know in advance.
3. Test. Try it out. Make use of the new “thingamajig” in a space where you can invite select users in and heavily moderate the experience to get that feedback. One real blind spot we seem to have in the AV industry is an understanding of how users approach our tech. What seems easy to us is just not. Instead of just silently watching users approach things to see what they try and how they try, we have an overwhelming desire to help them. So we teach the ones we can reach (a staggeringly small percentage of the user population) and then just hope the rest figure it out over time. So it’s key that we let them try and fail so that we are able to adjust our systems or our documentation etc., in order to make things truly easier for users.
4. Prototype deployment. Once we have a few rounds of iteration under our belts from the above, we now need to deploy that change to a small group somewhere. Maybe it’s a single floor with a pretty consistent user group, a smaller office, whatever … but we then communicate and deploy and watch what happens. We ensure that we have a technician standing by in case of issues, we survey heavily, and we see how it goes once the rubber hits the (albeit smaller) road.
5. Scaled versus gradual rollout. Based on the above, we adjust, we make changes and then we have to decide along with management, do we scale this (most of the time YES) or just blast the change. Sometimes we don’t have a choice, but whenever possible, we should look at scaled deployments that gradually increase in size as we are able to measure the impact on users.
6. Follow-up surveys and evaluation. Pretty self-explanatory. Even once we are done with deploying a small or large-scale change, it is crucial that we find ways to measure the effectiveness of said change. Did the users love it, did they even notice? Did we spend 200K on a change that nobody even noticed? Things like this will affect our decisions in the future.

Bear in mind as well that change management doesn’t just apply to things like new cameras or adding a digital whiteboard — it should apply to every facet of our systems. If Zoom has a new release and it is adding/removing features, changing the UI, whatever … we still must follow a Change Management process to ensure minimal impact to users. Because in the end, we need to adopt the ethos of “do no harm.”

In Conclusion

The low-hanging fruit of AV in a corporate enterprise will always be the in-room experience. It is first and foremost the experience for the users. But in order to meet the goals of an ITIL/ITSM world, we have to take things to the next level in order to be able to do all that is needed in the realm of reporting and metrics. And lastly, to be ready for the future, we need an environment that is both robust enough AND flexible enough that it allows us to experiment, and implement new features along with emerging technology solutions

When you are working toward a solid, reliable and mature AV environment, getting the rooms up and running is just the first step. AV teams require knowledge and expertise in not just the arcane dark arts of sound and light … but also must have familiarity and understanding of how ITIL practices can align AV as a standard IT practice. And in order to move into the future, it is critical that we are always looking to adopt the best practices of change management and the pursuit of Continual Service improvement in order to always be raising our own bar.

AV is a subset of IT, and to be successful, we have to find every way we can to embrace and adopt the ways and methods of ITIL.