Learn how to get started with AskCody
No matter how big or small your company - or the AskCody Meeting Management project you are about to implement - success requires planning, commitment, and strong sponsorship from your company’s executive team.
It is also critical that you understand the needs of your managers and users before getting started. What is it that you want to achieve? What is the desired business outcome that drives you throughout the process? What are the must-win battles? And what are the business processes that you want to support and streamline with AskCody?
Without a detailed understanding of these needs, it’s easy to go overboard in trying to customize the application just because it’s so easy, or you simply end up halfway through the implementation with a half-implemented IT project that lost traction and commitment, because it took too long to implement.
Who is this guide for?
This guide is made for System Owners (the person owning AskCody in your organization), System Administrators, Project Managers and Power Users (who are going to train other users and end-users) and Microsoft Exchange Admin’s who are responsible for implementing AskCody. The guide can also be used for other user groups involved in the implementation that are key to a specific step in the process, like Office Manager, Facilities Managers or Meeting Service Managers.
What is in this guide?
This guide covers the most important steps, features and configurations to go through to get you successfully started with AskCody Meeting Management and Resource Scheduling, as well as covering the initial Plan & Prepare phase to help you get the implementation kicked off, define a project group while helping you understand the overall process of a successful implementation.
You and your organization may need more advanced configurations or features to support your processes and needs along the way. These advanced features are covered by our extensive Help Center with extended articles. This guide covers the most important steps to get you successfully started with the Meeting Management Platform’s standard and default features that cover most jobs to be done and important features that get you started.
We recommend that you start with the features and configurations that this guide covers to get your most important needs covered, get familiar with the AskCody platform, and build a strong structure and foundation around the way you want to manage meetings and meeting rooms going forward. From there, you can easily extend features and functionality to cover all of your more advanced business needs and processes and you can work with our Customer Success team to get most of the platform with more customized configurations tailored to your business processes.
What are the 4 phases of a successful implementation?
- Plan & Prepare
- Set up & Configure
- Test & Deployment
- Training & Adoption
The model below presents the overall phases and steps for implementing AskCody. Each phase has multiple sub-tasks and steps that will help you implement the AskCody Meeting Management Platform. These are presented in each chapter going through these implementation phases.
- Plan and Prepare
The first phase is to plan and prepare the implementation. In this phase, you’ll identify your company’s vision, goals, and metrics as well as your resources, tools, and dependencies. Getting this phase right is crucial, so you won’t waste time or have to backtrack. This is also critical for the follow-up business reviews with the Customer Success Team – are we achieving our goals and vision for the implementation or how can we do better? This phase helps you organize your team for the implementation, set goals and define success criteria, understand your business rules and policies to be covered by the platform, and build a timeline for implementation so that everyone understands milestones and deadlines. - Set up & Configure
The next phase is to set up and configure the AskCody platform. Once you define your requirements and choose an implementation method, you are ready to set up and configure AskCody. We recommend you keep the initial implementation simple and start by using the features and available modules limited to “standard settings” to get familiar with the interface of AskCody, the features, and modules. That’s what most of this guide covers to give you the shortest time to value and keep things simple. As you get more experience with the AskCody Platform and receive feedback from your users, consider how to enhance the AskCody modules with advanced settings and configurations, that supports more business processes. In this guide, we link to more advanced features in our Help Center, so that you can easily access the information and help you need, as you get to the advanced settings. This phase also covers the integration and connection to Microsoft Exchange as well as setting up all modules of AskCody. - Test & Deployment
The third phase is testing and deploying for end-users. The timeline you defined in the planning phase should define the deployment phases and associated schedule. At this stage or phase in the implementation, the task is to get AskCody 'production-ready' by testing your configuration and setup, and adding, inviting and training end-users, to get everybody in your organization onboarded. - Training & Adoption
The last phase is to drive adoption. Once you’re up and running, it’s critical to get your users on board. To do so, it’s important that you support your users, measure adoption, and encourage adoption. This last step covers how.
All steps are listed in our Implementation Project Plan attached to this guide. This project plan can be used as a tool to support your implementation.
Happy implementation!
For Exchange Admins and Pros
If you read this guide as a system administrator or Microsoft Exchange Professional going to implement the Platform only and not as an involved party in the project group, you can skip the first step and go directly to Phase 2. Phase 2 covers the integration and connection to Microsoft Exchange.
For Active Directory Admins
If you read this guide as a system administrator or Active Directory Admin going to implement the user management only and not as an involved party in the project group, you can skip the first step and go directly to Phase 3 – Deploy for end users. Phase 3 covers the integration and connection to Active Directory.
If you have more than 50 users, we highly recommend that you integrate AskCody and Active Directory for ease of use, smoother deployment and maintenance, and better user experience.
AskCody both supports Active Directory and Azure Active Directory.
Next Step: Step 2. Plan and prepare for the implementation of AskCody - Organize your team