Aligning “System design” with “Collaboration needs”
Every successful AV system, especially any audio or video conferencing and collaboration installation, starts by understanding the customer’s needs.
As collaboration can take many forms from presentation systems to audio and video conferencing to data sharing and collaboration, each new system is an opportunity for the end user to get closer to their long-term strategic collaboration goals – whether that is to video-enable workflows, have seamless data collaboration, enable easy team collaboration, or other objectives.
While end users generally have a good idea of ‘what’ they want to do, they don’t necessarily understand ‘how’ to achieve their objectives. Conversely partners understand the ‘how’ very well, but can’t know the ‘what’ until they discover it from the end user. (See our previous post about the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ as background.)
So how can partners quickly align the ‘what’ and the ‘how’? The best way to do this is to have a formal discovery process/set of interactive and open-ended questions to understand ‘what’ the end user wants to achieve.
Remember, the end-user may be the AV/IT/facilities person who is responsible for the room or may be the line of business owner from whom the budget is coming.
Over the next few posts, we’ll investigate some of the questions, why they should be asked, and how to best use that information.
A some of the questions we’ll consider include:
- How will your teams collaborate?
- Is the space reconfigurable?
- How will local room participants’ audio be heard in the room?
- If there is remote collaboration, is audio and/or video conferencing required?
- How important is audio quality?
- and more!
