Implementation Plan in the Overall Project

As mentioned several times in this book, there are multiple phases to any project. The implementation plan represents yet another phase of the overall Active Directory project.

The implementation phase, which usually follows the lab and/or pilot phase, uses knowledge gained from these prior phases to build the implementation plan. The tasks necessary to implement the Active Directory design are discovered in the lab phase, and the nuances of rolling out Active Directory in your production environment are learned in the pilot phase of the project. All this knowledge goes into the development of your Active Directory implementation plan.

The pilot phase of a project is used to test the water. Active Directory design evolves out of the lab and into the production environment. A sample-set of users are identified, and the design is rolled out to those users. Thus, the pilot phase is in full swing.

The pilot phase has two purposes. One is to confirm that the Active Directory design functions in a pseudo-production environment as intended. The second is to gather information about how the design deploys to the pilot group. What is learned from the pilot deployment is then used to determine the best method for deploying the product across the enterprise.

Some other useful information gained during the pilot is the types of support and training necessary to make the pilot successful. Along with security and accessibility of resources, the amount of network bandwidth consumed by the pilot and the availability of piloted services are also types of information that can be gathered during the pilot and compared to what was recorded in the lab.