Over the past several months, I’ve had the privilege of facilitating dozens of workshops with customers around the world — documenting our journey and identifying the key themes that have an impact on our customers’ experience and, ultimately, their success.
To those who don’t live and breathe customer experience (CX) every day, this may read like a mouthful of industry jargon. But there’s a direct correlation between the experience we deliver and the success our customers achieve in the journey to their desired outcomes.
As John covered in his recent Success Readiness blog post, establishing a firm foundation at the start of a project is critical to achieving these outcomes. It also helps ensure that the technology — and the teams it will affect — are adequately prepared (and excited!) for the transformation ahead.
A key component of this foundation is the development of a Success Plan. As John defined in his post, a Success Plan is the execution blueprint for documenting business, technical, and project goals; assigning accountabilities; and helping keep projects on track.
Success Planning 101
While the vast majority of our customers have a robust methodology for traditional project planning, we quickly discovered that many weren’t taking full advantage of effective success planning — or the unique value it provides for documenting and helping them achieve measurable success.
When coupled with a comprehensive Success Readiness assessment, a Success Plan supports your extended project team in identifying and documenting requirements and capabilities — even potential risks to success.
Most importantly (and where success planning differs considerably from standard project planning), a Success Plan documents your desired business outcomes, how you will measure success, and the steps you need to take to get there.
Success Plan Builder
As part of the recent reimagination of the Success Center, we rebuilt the Success Plan module to give both our customers and partners a tool that enables self-service planning and management of their projects. The result of this effort includes:
- An expanded experience to guide success readiness
- Additional data capture to drive project milestones
- Permission setting that simplifies sharing across stakeholders
- Alignment of relevant content for planning efforts
Let’s take a quick tour of the new functionality and see how you can leverage our platform to create a Success Plan within minutes.
First, simply log in with your MyCitrix credentials and select Create New Plan on your personalized dashboard.
From here, you’ll be directed to answer a handful of questions related to your project. Once that’s complete, select Continue to plan to generate your Success Plan outline.
Your Success Plan is now ready to be populated! Within the Success Plan builder, you’ll see tabs for our seven success readiness pillars. Each tab contains prompts to help guide you through the considerations found within the Success Readiness Checklist, enabling you to document the relevant inputs for your project under each pillar.
You’ll find thought-starters and template content — based on our leading practices — in many of the fields within the pillar tabs. These are all fully editable, so feel free to customize your responses as needed. If you need any tips or guidance, simply click the ‘i’ dot next to the section header. A window with additional helpful context will appear.
Also make sure your spend some time with the Related Resources we’ve curated within each pillar. These links provide direct access to supporting content available within the Journey Toolkit — from Change Management templates, to the End User Experience Kit, to step-by-step build guides — and all kinds of business-focused and technical content in between.
Two quick administrative notes. If you need to change your original input at any time, just select Edit plan. A blade will appear, allowing you to update your previous selections as needed. We’re currently working to dynamically populate content based on your selections and inputs, so it’s important to maintain an accurate Success Plan — especially as your strategy shifts and evolves. More to come on that!
Finally, you can now share your plan (and permissions) with other project stakeholders. Select Share plan and enter the email address of the person with whom you’d like to share your Success Plan. You’ll then assign permissions to indicate whether that person will have read-only viewer permissions or if they’ll be able to fully edit and manage the plan.
Once a plan is shared with you — or whenever you create one from scratch — it will automatically be available within your All Plans view. This view is accessible via the left-hand navigation from your dashboard.
Remember, the extent to which you build out your personalized Success Plan is completely up to you. While the framework provides a platform for holistic success readiness and planning, none of the content is necessarily required for completion. (Though we highly recommend being as thorough as possible!)
No matter how in-depth your input, you can leverage the Success Plan as a standalone planning mechanism or as a complement to your existing planning efforts. And no matter your strategy, the Success Plan can help you and your team think about the key elements that are often overlooked in traditional project plans — like setting goals and documenting success measures.
What’s Next?
We hope to see you in the Success Center! Our Customer Success Management team is always available to walk you through success planning strategies within this self-service platform — simply reach out to your CSM or contact us.
We’re also happy to share tips and tricks for documenting and measuring your desired outcomes, preparing your stakeholders for rollout, planning Day 2 operational coverage, or completing key project milestones that may require technical guidance. And that’s just to name a few!
Keep an eye on our blog channel as we continue our deep dives into our new journey-led deliverables within the Success Center and how they’re improving experience while driving success for our customers throughout their Citrix journey.
Happy planning!
— Sara Queen, Senior Manager, Customer Success Management
