Unified Communications (UC) lives or dies on two things: how well you run the service, and how reliable the network is underneath it.
That is why infrastructure upgrade readiness is not just a tech refresh, it is an employee experience decision.
In this guide, I’ll walk through three common “banana peels” that trip up buyers, and I’ll split each one into service management (ITSM) and connectivity so your plan is balanced.
Along the way, we’ll weave in an ITSM implementation checklist, a practical connectivity adoption plan, and a simple way to approach ITSM ROI planning without turning it into an unnecessary headache.
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1) Managing Interoperability: The Hidden Tripwires in Infrastructure Upgrade Readiness
Service Management (ITSM):
The biggest early mistake is treating IT service management as a standalone tool. In UC, tickets, changes, and alerts need to flow between your service desk and the systems employees actually use. This means Teams, Zoom, calling, meeting rooms, and Wi-Fi.
If those connections are missing, teams end up copy-pasting between tools, and incidents bounce around with no clear owner.
A practical ITSM implementation checklist for enterprise UC service operations usually starts with:
- Confirm what data your ITSM platform needs (assets, users, locations, critical UC services).
- Decide what must integrate on day one (identity, monitoring alerts, UC admin portals).
- Map “who owns what” before the rollout, not during the first outage.
Connectivity:
UC is real-time, so connectivity issues hit people in the moment. Guidance from Microsoft highlights that real-time media quality is heavily impacted by end-to-end network connectivity. Buyers are advised to assess capacity and performance for peak usage, not best-case conditions.
If you are using Teams heavily, Microsoft also provides a Network Assessment Tool to measure key call-impacting metrics like loss, jitter, and round-trip time to the nearest edge.
This is where avoiding risk during hybrid UCaaS transformation becomes practical: run a pre-rollout network assessment, then create a lightweight connectivity risk assessment 2026 that answers, “Where will calls fail first, and what is our fallback?”
It’s also worth grounding this in outage reality. Uptime Institute reporting shows many outages are often tied to power, network, software, and human factors. That is exactly why interoperability and change control matter: one misstep in the stack can ripple into UC downtime.
2) Employee Buy-In: Building a Complementary Culture
Service Management (ITSM):
ITSM only improves work if employees use it. You ideally want to avoid people still relying on their friend in the IT department or raising issues in random channels. Otherwise, your shiny new platform becomes a reporting dashboard for a reality that is happening somewhere else.
Guiding employee buy-in starts with accepting that this is a change program as much as a tooling program.
This program includes establishing visible leadership support, simple training, and clear “what’s in it for me?” messaging for end users and IT teams.
Make the cultural goal simple: fewer back-and-forth messages, faster fixes, and clearer ownership.
What will 2026 and beyond look like for UC infrastructure? Check out our trends roundup to catch a glimpse of the future of service management & connectivity.
Connectivity:
Connectivity changes can create immediate friction if employees feel the rollout is being done to them, not for them. The fastest way to lose trust is a wave of “my calls are broken” with no clear help path.
This is where employee experience data matters. So, your connectivity adoption plan to improve UC reliability and call quality should include two basics:
- a simple “how to get help” path (with fast triage), and
- a short user-facing checklist (headsets, Wi-Fi basics, where to check call health).
3) Proving ROI: Measuring Value to Impress the Buying Committee
Service Management (ITSM):
Infrastructure upgrade readiness is about more than making an impact – it’s also about measuring it.
A common banana peel is trying to prove the ROI without a baseline. If you want credible ITSM ROI planning, pick a few metrics that map directly to productivity and stability:
- Mean time to resolve incidents (MTTR)
- Major incident frequency and duration
- Ticket deflection (self-service success)
- Change success rate (how often changes cause incidents)
For a reference point, Forrester & ServiceNow quantified outcomes from modernizing IT service management. They concluded that a change could spark productivity improvement, fewer high-severity incidents, and more.
Connectivity:
Bad UC is often highly visible for employees, so proving connectivity ROI revolves around accurately tracking improvements in their QoE (Quality of Experience).
Start measuring:
- Call quality incidents per 100 users
- Repeated meeting drop reports
- Time spent troubleshooting “is it the network or the app?”
- Improvements in managed network quality metrics
And if you need a “why this matters” number for stakeholders, industry research shows that downtime can cost enterprises hundreds of thousands of dollars within hours.
Bottom line: ROI is not just cost savings. It is fewer disruptions, faster recovery, and fewer wasted hours in “Can you hear me now?” mode.
Key Things To Remember
If you want a safe rollout, treat readiness as three parallel tracks: (1) interoperability and data center planning, (2) employee buy-in, and (3) measurement.
Combine an ITSM implementation checklist, a realistic connectivity adoption plan, and upfront ITSM ROI planning, and you will reduce rollout risk while improving UC reliability and the day-to-day employee experience.
To find more advice on the service management & connectivity adoption process, check out our free ultimate guide here!
FAQs
How do I know if we’re ready to adopt a new ITSM or connectivity platform?
You’re ready when you have: clear owners for UC services, baseline metrics (tickets and call quality), and a short plan for integrations, training, and escalation.
What are the most common mistakes when rolling out ITSM and network upgrades?
The big two are: adopting tools without integrating them into real workflows, and launching network changes without measuring real-time UC performance first.
