Assessment

The first step in designing and deploying an Operations Manager 2007 solution is to understand the current environment. A detailed assessment gathers information from a variety of sources, resulting in a document that you can easily review and update. This process ensures there is a complete understanding of the existing environment. Although the concept of an assessment document is very common within consulting organizations as part of the process of implementing new technologies, we recommend also using this approach for projects internal to an organization.

The principles underlying the importance of assessments is summed up well by Stephen R. Covey’s Habit #5, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon & Schuster, 1989). From the perspective of an Operations Manager assessment, this means you should fully understand the environment before designing a solution to monitor it.