Hardware remote deployment (in as much devilish detail as possible)

Context

For posterity, readers who chance upon this article long after the covid19 pandemic has been all but a forgotten memory, there was a period of time when borders were closed and businesses were at it’s most innovative figuring out ways to still serve cross border customers.

For the fellow readers who are currently stuck in the now of covid19 pandemic, hopefully this may help provide you with ideas on how to support and bring in revenue from customers who are left stranded overseas.

As the title implies, this will explore details (as much as I can provide without violating any NDAs) of the steps and preparation to development, deploy and support customers from overseas.

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Where to begin? So many ways to skin this obscenely obese cat. Instead of breaking things down into pillars like ops, engineering, legal etc, it made more sense to me to have high level groupings like customer documents required and internal documents required. (Working on the deliverables helped me plan out what was needed)

Customer documents would include:

• current as is process
• existing baselines (to show proof our technology is worth the investment 🤞)
• Tools inventory(reporting, knowledge management etc)
• Change management plan (how have they budgeted their internal strategy to implement the changes)
• Resource plan (as part of the change management plan)
• Onboarding and offboarding procedures
  This would include basics like signing of NDAs, NCAs, access to their VPN etc

Internal documents:

• 😵More thought required…

But at least with the customer documents it helped to determine where to place resources to strengthen or build from scratch.

🐰🕳️

Knowledge base

I normally use the knowledge base setup as a starting point. The knowledge hive mind is the backbone for projects I start.

Communication portal of choice is teams (yes I prefer Microsoft walled garden as opposed to the Google drive, Slack integration mess — this statement might haunt me at a later point in time, but hey, Covid19… YOLO)