[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.]
Delivering innovation to market with speed while adhering to compliance requires the entire Microsoft ecosystem to work as one. Customer expectations and the rules for business are constantly changing. To meet these challenges, we’ve radically changed how we develop and release products to market by applying a continually updated services model. This shift required significant transformation to our internal processes, policies, and platform delivery expectations. As a result of these changes to our operating model, we created a single, company-wide launch delivery practice. Launch optimization focuses on improved product quality, relevant marketing materials, and efficient financial systems that all comply with business rules and policies.
Launch optimization is a key initiative in our ongoing digital transformation. You can learn more about our vision and initiatives by reading Inside the transformation of IT at Microsoft.
Understanding the changing launch landscape
Business and technology landscapes are changing; increasing globalization continually creates more markets, more customers, and more business potential. In turn, these factors increase the demand for and frequency of product and service releases. Historically, the processes we used to release our products and services were managed in isolation with limited integrated planning and automation. Our teams faced multiple business challenges, including:
- Predicting the end-to-end experience of our customers.
- Effectively managing compliance requirements.
- Identifying the most significant collective risks early in the cycle.
- Managing readiness in predictable ways for each audience.
- Getting ahead of issues that customers were experiencing.
- Incorporating standardization and automation in our processes.
Product release required multiple processes that were complex and cumbersome for internal teams and Microsoft customers and partners. Microsoft has more than 600 launch types—such as products, services, capabilities, and business models—that map to a matrix of delivery channels, including Microsoft Volume Licensing, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The products are governed by many programs and policies—all delivered through a variety of systems and processes. Our customers and partners deal with continual changes in licensing, pricing, interfaces, purchasing rules, benefits, partner incentives, and support options, which can leave them overwhelmed and dissatisfied with their overall experiences. It became apparent that a strategy and set of launch optimization investments were necessary to create a simplified way for our customers to do business with Microsoft, and to help us remain competitive in an increasingly complex marketplace.
Optimizing launch management with investments
The Microsoft Business Operations organization is the steward of the rules for how Microsoft does business. They’re working to build and maintain industry-leading processes for Microsoft to compliantly launch products, services, and capabilities with agility, quality, and scale. As Microsoft undergoes digital transformation, the vision for launch optimization is to create a predictable, compliant digital launch process and platform that will accelerate speed to market, reduce cost per launch, and continuously improve our customer and partner experiences.
To achieve this vision, Microsoft is engaging in five investments: digital portfolio management; launch automation; product, offer, and price management; readiness at scale; and intelligent insights.
Digital portfolio management
The vision for digital portfolio management is to create an end-to-end planning process that aligns teams to a collective understanding of: launch goals, such as market outcome and return on investment; risks, such as compliance, experience, and process effects; and dependencies, such as tasks or milestones that must be delivered in one launch to enable the success of another. With the pace of change, alignment must be ongoing. Launch isn’t a one-time event, but rather an ongoing series of changes. Orienting teams to a continuous cycle of launching, monitoring, and aligning is a significant cultural shift for the organization.
Portfolio management is about being better together. At a mature level, digital portfolio management results in the identification of substantial effects early in the launch cycle. Teams align on market outcomes and tradeoffs, and compliance is ensured. Our investments include evaluation of customer experiences, a centralized compliance repository, enhanced reporting and telemetry, and an integrated feedback mechanism.
Challenges
Within digital portfolio management, complexity is a significant challenge. Compliance requirements are managed in a non-standardized manner, requiring multiple finance and legal teams to be involved in every launch. Isolated management processes prevent an aggregated overview of changes that impact how customers and partners transact with Microsoft, which makes it difficult to align all-up readiness across each audience. With no comprehensive overview of the launch portfolio, launch pipelines and insights are scattered across many monitoring systems.
Benefits
Our investment in digital portfolio management is creating benefits across Microsoft, including:
- Verified compliance against a central repository containing a standard set of compliance rules. Launch teams can use this data to manage compliance early and consistently in the launch cycle.
- Aggregated insights across customer, partner, and field audiences. This includes identification of any bifurcation across go-to-market scenarios that causes friction with these audiences, in addition to the transactional effects.
- End-to-end portfolio transparency. We have transparency and alignment at all levels, which are managed in a single platform by launch teams, directors, general managers, and executives for policies, tradeoffs, and launch plans.
- An end-to-end assessment process with digitized, reusable artifacts. A digitized, end-to-end process makes it easier to quickly create assessment environments across digital portfolio management.
- Integrated feedback mechanisms. We are building systematic feedback loops across Microsoft to better identify friction points and opportunities to improve how we transact with partners and customers.
Launch automation
Launch automation reaches all aspects of the launch process, enabling us to create pre-established, compliant launch workflows that simplify and speed up the launch process. The vision for this investment is to build on the evolving launch discipline that exists today to lower risk and raise launch capacity. Launch automation gives us increased ability to manage changes mid-launch, and quickly mobilize all teams around significant risks and the mitigation of those risks. It also ensures predictability with launch schedules and drastically improves speed to market by automating the launch process. Automating low-value tasks also improves the speed to market and shifts capacity to enable launch teams to focus on higher-value tasks such as problem-solving.
Challenges
Disconnected launch processes make it difficult to adequately monitor launch status and deliverables on a per launch and per portfolio basis. Our employees spend too much time on low-value, manual tasks, which negatively impacts time-to-market. The compliance process is manual and time intensive, and it takes too long to ensure compliance requirements are met and documented. We don’t have a standardized template or method to govern launch processes. This leads to isolated launch processes that require significant manual intervention.
Benefits
Our investment in launch automation is creating benefits across Microsoft, including:
- Increased scalability, productivity, and compliance. A completely digital launch process, including artifacts and launch workflow, enables more efficiency, better integration, and more relevant insights.
- Increased time savings. Automation and repeatable processes within the launch environment increase the time our launch teams have to focus on high-value work.
- Simplified workflow management. Repeatable workflow management creates a clear overview of standard go-to-market motions, such as product price changes. This enables more robust workflow management and provides a template our teams can use to convert nonstandard scenarios into standard ones.
- Early identification of potential issues. Collaboration on reusable launch workflow components enables launch teams early on in the launch process to identify effects on compliance, end-to-end customer or partner experiences, and internal processes.
- Improved performance tracking. We can track performance against intended outcomes and provide recommendations on how we can continuously improve factors such as experiences, standardization, and automation.
Product, offer and price management
The product, offer, and price management investment will reduce the amount of time it takes to create and manage product and price data and make it easier to do business with Microsoft. This investment will help ensure the product or offer lifecycle—from creation to end-of-support—follows all compliance controls and deploys at the optimum speed for Microsoft and its customers and partners. We’re transforming the product, offer, and price management investment to be a connected, compliant, efficient business process by automating tasks and digitizing rules management across the entire company.
Challenges
The product, offer, and price management process is highly manual and requires long lead times with numerous hand-offs across the enterprise. The process relies heavily on human intelligence to ensure compliance rules are followed, and accurate reporting is possible. The increasing complexity of offers and internal digital transformation is creating increased compliance risks. Partners have had a negative experience consuming price lists because of volume and less-than-friendly product descriptions. Product data hierarchy, taxonomies, and execution processes are different across systems, requiring translations between systems and resultant decreased process efficiency.
Benefits
Our investment in product, offer, and price management is already creating benefits across Microsoft, including:
- Consistency. We’re creating a consistent and repeatable end-to-end process for the entire product, offer, and price lifecycle that’s compliant, accurate, and timely.
- Streamlined data availability. We’re simplifying available pricing data where applicable and refining how we present that data to our partners. Streamlining our data enables faster consumption and broader availability.
- Simplified product design. Removing complexity in our product design process reduces our time to market for high revenue products and offers.
Readiness at scale
The readiness at scale investment focuses on creating an end-to-end process that creates alignment across the company and delivers the appropriate content at the correct time and place to the right audience. Readiness at scale keeps the customer at the center and enables all of Microsoft to work together to create content efficiently and effectively.
Challenges
Readiness is impaired by disconnected information sources. We have too many sources for launch information across Microsoft for customers, partners, and employees. We need more consistent and efficient content delivery formats, platforms, and methods. Our processes for creating readiness material contain gaps and overlap across numerous teams, and gaps in strategic launch planning result in launch-by-launch deliveries that are not coordinated and hinder the digital transformation initiative.
Benefits
Our investment in readiness at scale is creating benefits across Microsoft, including:
- Greater insight into readiness approach. The insights derived from feedback loops in readiness management help us understand the most optimal readiness approach (content, method, and timing) for each audience and go-to-market model.
- Consistent content. We’re establishing a set of standard content assets across the company, ensuring content is created once and used by many to drive consistency.
- Embed readiness content where customers, partners, and field audiences need it. We’re embedding readiness content in the tools and portals they use every day in their roles.
- Better relationship management. We’re creating a unified and thoughtful approach to change management across all launches to simplify how we communicate to our customers and partners and provide them with a complete perspective on how their business interacts with Microsoft.
- Reduced costs. We’re reducing costs by using machine translation platforms and tools to streamline content creation and delivery.
Intelligent Insights
The goal of the intelligent insights investment is to enable data-driven decision making through specific and actionable insights for all roles interacting with the launch. We’re embedding technology into core business processes making automation, telemetry, and insights integral to every launch the company does. The foundation of intelligent insights is building a world-class launch platform built on three fundamental principles:
- Systems-based compliance enforcement. We’re moving away from a human-dependent process for compliance in favor of a constantly controlled, automated process that provides the right policy, requirements, and practices for every new change we manage
- Role-based digital productivity. We’re creating a common set of tools to build intuitive workflows that enable effortless collaboration for employees, and context-rich information for leadership.
- Data-driven decision making. We’re moving from just reporting data to making data-driven decisions. Real-time reporting and telemetry are powering innovation in process, organizational learning, and analytical insights.
Challenges
The intelligent insights investment addresses several challenges. Compliance rules are continually changing and growing. Compliance adherence needs to be agile, but it’s currently managed through manual processes. Specific knowledge and functional expertise are required to identify risks, issues, and dependencies accurately, but they’re difficult to obtain, so it’s not easy for launch team members to identify next actionable steps. We need more robust monitoring and effective management for launch policies.
Benefits
Our investment in intelligent insights is creating benefits across Microsoft, including:
- Compliance by design. Compliance by design enables us to manage compliance rules and policies through a single source, at any scale.
- Improved consistency and repeatability. We’re using AI in digital assistants to better support the launch process, which increases consistency and repeatability.
- Increased agility. We’re creating workflows with layered AI to collect and share insights that further improve the launch process and enable launch teams to be more agile.
- Improved forecasting. With the rich telemetry available, launch managers can identify the potential effects of change requests and dependencies on the launch process.
- Improved experience. We’re using insights derived from feedback loops with our customers and partners to collaboratively design a better end-to-end experience.
- Increased knowledge availability. We’re building and maintaining a knowledge management repository to digitally assist with the management of data, data policies, go-to-market policies, business rules, and compliance controls throughout the product, offer, and price lifecycles.
Enabling and measuring launch excellence at Microsoft
We’re enabling an optimized launch environment by using several Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Visual Studio Online, Microsoft Office 365, and Microsoft AI. Using these technologies are moving us toward a more fluid, repeatable, and measurable launch environment.
Our measures of success focus on increased speed-to-market through standardization, simplification, and reduced friction on nonstandard launches, reduction in cost per launch, and launch compliance. To be competitive, we must be faster to market, and help our customers and partners realize value from our products as quickly as possible:
- Speed to market. We’re increasing our speed to market by at least 50 percent. The time it takes to deliver innovation to market is critical, and the evolution of automated, pattern-based launches will drive that increase. We’re making this reduction in nonstandard (complex) and standard launch scenarios, increasing our launch capacity and throughput.
- Cost per launch. We’re reducing standard launch costs by approximately 25 percent. We’re also reducing the time it takes to manage a change and the time required to set up launches in systems, primarily through process automation.
- Compliance. We’re reducing unresolved risks and unidentified compliance issues. We’re identifying all potential compliance risks through early assessments and closing out on all compliance risks and issues before launching a product or service to market.
- Digital launch workflow ratio. We’re working toward a 100 percent digital-launch workflow that is centralized and integrated. We want all resources that we use for Microsoft launches to manage the entire launch lifecycle and related deliverables in a single, intuitive, and productive experience. With AI, a launch manager can use this experience to predict issues, risks, and dependencies. It can also prepopulate standard launch deliverables and utilize automated controls to drive compliance by design.
On our journey toward launch optimization, we’ve identified foundational principles to enable effective transformation:
- Be vision-led. Across all digital transformation modalities, you must have an established vision to guide people, processes, and technology that enable optimization. The vision sets the entire organization on the same path, in the same direction, with the same goals.
- Make launch investment a priority. Investments in people, process, and technology are at the core of successful launch optimization. To create the most effective optimization within your launch environment, you need to understand and commit to these investments as they apply to your organization.
- Prioritize progress over perfection. Launch optimization is a journey. You achieve a vision through continual, iterative progress, learning from each step, optimizing along the way. People, process, and technology must work together to bring your vision to reality.
Conclusion
At Microsoft, we’ve radically changed how we develop and release products to market by applying a continually updated services model. We’re transforming our internal processes, policies, and platform delivery expectations to meet continually evolving customer expectations and the changing rules for doing business. We’re ensuring that our launch workflows work together across a common platform and that financial systems are efficient and comply with all business rules and processes. Our launch delivery practice is helping us delivering innovation to market with speed and compliance. Launch optimization is helping to create an environment in which the entire Microsoft organization is empowered to work as one.
