Consistency is what transforms average into excellence.
Syed Balkhi
Looking for Consistency | Integrator Insights
By Mike Pedersen
Preparing for our summer classroom upgrades is often a fun time for me – it is selfishly one of the times I choose to get a lot more hands-on. This week I’ve been helping build out equipment racks. It has a little Christmas feel as I open the boxes of brand-new hardware and drop them into an equipment rack. It is also one of the times we get to build multiple racks simultaneously. Thus, the topic of consistency has been on my mind this week. What are we doing, or should be doing, to ensure a consistent experience for both our faculty and our technical staff? I’m confident most of you have been doing these things for years, but if this article helps one organization, it will be worth writing. So, with that, what are some practices we have been undertaking to help us be more consistent?
A lot of this boils down to standardization and making standards your own. I’ve written and spoken about standardization a fair amount already, and I will be talking about it again at InfoComm in June. The first step toward consistency is establishing a set of standards for your institution. You can check out my prior Integrator Insights articles on standardization here and here. For this article, however, I want to get very specific with three areas I have been reminded of as I dive into summer project pre-work. Here are three of our recently adopted opportunities for consistency:
Rack elevations
Just last week I took the opportunity to develop a set of standardized rack elevations. Our team certainly has had a general order in their heads as they designed and built out racks, but it had not yet been formally documented. We have a few slightly different functionality profiles that could apply to any classroom. I documented a standard rack elevation for each of those functional profiles. While you may have well-developed design tools to make beautiful rack elevations like the tool from our partner XTEN-AV, I just knocked it out quickly on an Excel spreadsheet. As we get busy building racks in the next few weeks, these rack elevations will not only provide a consistent look and feel for the racks, but also allow us to get faster and cleaner as we wire up the racks and ultimately get familiar with the path each cable typically runs.
Input/output order
We have also developed a standard input order on our switches for our typical inputs. For us, we input in this order: house PC (atypical for us), first laptop connection, second laptop connection, wireless (for us, a Solstice Pod), document camera, and finally Blu-ray player. This has at least two obvious benefits we can see: uniform control system programming and easier troubleshooting. For either control system programming or troubleshooting, our team will eventually already know which devices are plugged into which inputs without having to refer to a drawing or other documentation. Again, while many of you have done this for years, we have only recently moved in this direction, so maybe this is something your organization still needs to do, too. As an aside here, yes, I do have two laptop connections in the order. Why? For rooms that have a dual projection, we give the faculty the option to display two separate sources at the same time, one on each projector. It surprises me sometimes how many instructors use that feature and brings two laptops to class.
Plug order in power distribution unit (PDU)
We have been putting in network controllable PDUs for a couple of years now; with these units, you can turn on or off individual outlets on the PDU via the network or subsequently the control system. With the functionality, we determined it stands to reason that having a consistent order of what devices are plugged into what outlets have similar benefits as a consistent input order – again for benefits in programming and troubleshooting. In your case, even if you are using more basic PDUs, having a consistent outlet order would allow you to instantly know what power cord to unplug when you determine you need to power-cycle a device. This is not a replacement for labeling cables – every cable gets a label on each end, including power cables. But we hope a consistent order will minimize the need to get our phone flashlight deep into the back of the rack to try and read the cable labels in the middle of an incident response; we’ll simply know which power cord belongs to the device of interest.
These are only three of the many opportunities to bring consistency to our (and your) processes and system builds. I personally think there is value in occasionally taking time to really think about new opportunities for standardization and consistency across the entire range of our operations from very macro areas to more concrete and specific areas like the three I shared here. I hope this sparks some conversation in our collective higher-ed AV hive mind. There are so many opportunities for our team to continue to grow and improve, so I’d love to learn about areas in which your organization has taken consistency to the next level. Please comment on our socials, hit me up on the Higher Ed AV/IT slack channel, or send me a note on LinkedIn!
