Prioritizing Your Applications

Even before you compile the list of applications, you can start devising a way to classify and prioritize them. If you have the scheme developed by the time you perform the inventory, you can classify applications as you find them. You need a prioritization scheme for two reasons:

• You might not have time to adequately test all applications by the rollout date.
• You need to know which applications are showstoppers—that is, which ones must function properly for deployment to proceed.

The ultimate goal of your prioritization effort is to identify the core group of applications that must function properly before you begin to deploy Windows 2000. When you develop your prioritization scheme, consider the following issues:

• Importance of the application to the organization
• Number of users affected
• Availability of newer versions
• Localization needs

Your organization might already have a classification scheme that you can use or modify. For example, you might have prioritized your applications for your disaster recovery plan. If you identified which applications must be back online first during a disaster, these applications might have top priority for compatibility testing.

The complexity of your prioritization scheme depends on factors such as how many applications you have and the variety of business functions they support.

One large high-technology company developed four priority levels. They defined their priorities as follows:

Mission critical   These applications must be online first after a disaster. They are required to collect revenue or fulfill a legal obligation. The organization is willing to accept no risk or very little risk of failure for these applications, and the impact or cost of failure would be very high.

Business critical   These applications must be online second after a disaster. They are required to run the business infrastructure. Human resource applications are an example of business-critical applications. The organization is willing to accept little risk of failure, and the impact or cost of failure would be moderate.

Required   These applications are required to run the business but can be offline for a longer period of time. The organization is willing to accept moderate risk of failure, and the impact or cost of failure would be low.

Other   These applications do not fit in any of the preceding categories, and business can continue without them.

Another large high-technology organization had just two categories: mission critical and not mission critical. In case there was insufficient time to test all applications, this organization wanted to ensure that the mission-critical applications were fully tested and any problems resolved before they began their deployment.

© 1985-2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.