You should also be familiar with other services that are running on the network and that rely on the infrastructure. You should prioritize these services to better understand bandwidth utilization and service levels that have been assigned to specific functions. If the customer is implementing ITIL best practices, you should know about all disciplines that are currently being leveraged.
You should collect information about the following:
Which Service Desk software is currently used by the customer, and how does the deployment of ZENworks Configuration Management fit within this framework?
Does the customer have a formal Service Level Agreement (SLA) process in place? If so, what is it and can you access the documentation that explains it?
What is the customer’s Disaster Recovery and Service Continuity plans? How does this impact the ZENworks Configuration Management design?
How does the customer plan for availability of services and resources? Is the customer fully aware of availability requirements?
Does the customer leverage a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)? If so, which CMDB? Does the customer have plans to include information that is stored in the ZENworks database in their CMDB?
Does the customer have a formal method for keeping track of changes to applications that are published to the end-user communities?
Does the customer have a Definitive Software Library (DSL) and Definitive Hardware Library (DHL)?
Is the customer using another framework product in its infrastructure, such as IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, or HP OpenView?
Does the customer leverage other products, such as SAP?
What other major projects are currently taking place at the customers’ sites?