PROJECT SPOTLIGHT

Lee County VOIP Implementation - 2008
 
Lee County went live with a Mitel VOIP (Voice over IP) system on January 16, 2008, but the project had been in the works for many months. Although the actual employees mainly noticed the change by enhanced features and new phones, there were wholesale changes happening behind the scenes. During this project, the IT Department that manages the telephony environment, took the opportunity to change/upgrade the legacy environment to:  

*     Voicemail/Unified Messaging (Mitel 6500 UM)
*     Network fabric (HP Procurve POE)
*     Power-protected MDFs/IDFs (Generator protected)
*     New Carrier for PRIs
*     New Long-Distance Provider
*     Forklift of telephony environment to new product offering (Mitel)

As with any major project, there were valuable lessons learned. In Lee County's case, most were around the migration of the phone system from a Nortel to a Mitel environment. While standards based protocols (Q.Sig) existed between the Nortel and Mitel platforms, testing revealed that updates of the legacy system would be required to maintain functionality between the two systems. The decision was made to make a forklift change instead of a phased migration. This kept the budget in check but made project planning more important. "Once the decision was made to have a hard cutover to the VOIP system, it really placed the emphasis on managing implementation timelines of the various factors", says Ryan Draughn, IT Director for Lee County Government. Draughn also adds, "Having in-house telecommunications staff with strong project planning skills [Nedra Norton] was crucial to pulling everything together at the right time. We try to be good stewards of tax payer money, so when a new carrier entered our market with attractive pricing for PRI service, we worked around their buildout plans to have the long term cost benefits. The challenge was coordinating with our VOIP integrators, network team, training staff, carrier, and other partners. In addition, the exhaustive network infrastructure planning (VLAN establishment, switch upgrades, data wiring, etc.) made the mid-day cutover possible. The project plan included over 225 VOIP phones and the cutover took less than 20 minutes". Going forward, Lee County has plans to migrate their remote offices onto the new system. When complete, the total will encompass over 400 phones.