Deployment design and planning

Owned by Chris Hoffman
Last updated: Nov 16, 2009Version comment

Before embarking on a deployment of CollectionSpace, you should consider the following questions. They will help you develop a deployment plan that you can support. Of course, there is nothing to stop you from experimenting with the software, and in fact, being able to display a working system quickly can help build momentum and help the organization make a decision about whether or not to expend more effort.

What would you like your deployment to look like?

  • How would you ideally approach an implementation of CollectionSpace? 
    • We are introducing a new system where none exists now.
    • We need to migrate off of current legacy system quickly.
    • We can afford to test the system thoroughly and run in parallel with the legacy system for some time.
  • What is the size and complexity of your organization, especially with respect to planning for a collection management system rollout?  How many people will be using the system?
  • Do you have certain scheduling requirements or constraints? Examples...
    • We don't get anything done in December.
    • We have to have this done by June 2011.
  • What are the key problems you are trying to solve?
    • Transactional management of your collection
    • Bringing several sub-collections together
    • Sharing your collection with the public
    • Safeguarding your collection
    • All of the above.  While this is the likely answer, you do want to establish your priorities.

Who will do this work?

  • Will you do this entirely using your existing team?
  • Or will you try to have someone help with some aspects of the project?
    • Project management
    • Programming
    • Testing
    • And so on ...

CollectionSpace is working with a community of service providers who can help your organization.

What resources do you have?

We all live with constraints on our resources, so it is better to understand them up front.

  • Financial
  • People
    • Technical
    • Domain/functional experts
  • Hardware

Do you have any special security requirements or concerns?

  • Parts of our collections are off limits to the public
  • Parts of our collection are off limits even within the museum
  • We have been the target of hackers before

Where do you want your CollectionSpace environment to live?

  • Your own physical server
  • A shared resource in your institution/organization/university
  • A server or virtual machine that you lease but take care of yourself
  • A server or virtual machine that you lease and which is taken care of by others
  • Somewhere in the web-cloud where you don't need to do anything but use CollectionSpace

How do you plan on taking care of the system once it is in place?

  • We have our own support staff
  • We know we need to add on more capabilities
  • We need someone else to take care of it
  • We do/do not have budget for ongoing support of the system

What functions do you want your deployment of CollectionSpace to provide?

You will need to understand the CollectionSpace processes and procedures and then compare them to your own in order to:

  • Determine which functions of CollectionSpace you will deploy (and which ones you will hide)
  • Determine at a high level how much customization of the existing schema and screens you will want to perform
  • Decide whether this a good time (or a bad one) to reengineer some of those business processes
  • Identify any processes or procedures you currently perform that are not in CollectionSpace, and what to do about it
    • Identify workaround?
    • Find out where that process is on the CollectionSpace roadmap
    • Talk with other museums and collections to see if they are modeling that in CollectionSpace in domain extensions
  • Do you need other customized capabilities?
  • Identify reporting requirements and outputs
  • Identify required integration with other systems

We need some tools to help with process mapping here.

How will you manage your project?

Whether you want to call it this or not, when deploying a system like CollectionSpace, you will probably want to cover the following activities:

  • Communication: How often do you communicate what to whom and how?
  • Governance and decision-making: Who makes the ultimate decision on this?  Who will support you?
  • Monitoring of the different parts of the effort
  • Changes: Change will happen.  Managing that change and having a process for managing "scope creep" will help out.  If someone identifies some desired customization, ask yourself whether that will change when you can deploy the system. 

Models and Scenarios

Depending on your goals and resources, there are several models for different sizes of deployments.

We should show some scenarios with estimated costs and timeframes.