5. Be consistent
No matter how you choose to connect your remote offices, it's important that your decision is consistent and standard for all of your offices.
"You have to standardize," Crawford says. "You can't have unique implementations in each office. It's almost like a cookie cutter approach you want to take with each of your offices within a company: You want to make sure those offices are pretty standardized, in terms of configurations, and technology, and support that's used. That way, regardless of the office, regardless of the individual, they're getting a consistent product or service."
Even if you choose to mix legacy infrastructure with new, cloud computing, you need to design the same system for every office. A consistent system means business owners can spend less time trying to solve the nuances from office to office—especially when problems arise—and have more time to dedicate to the actual business. Business owners shouldn't need to muck around with the operational pieces; they need to focus on making money in sales, growing the business, and administrating.
Some may think standardization means no customization. This is a false assumption, says Crawford.
"The services are configured for their particular business needs; the point is, we need to deliver a standardized approach that's predictable for our customers," Crawford says. "The way you get things to work is through predictability, and the way to get predictability is through standardization."
This post originally appeared at Inc.
