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After Microsoft tackled the easy stuff, digital transformation got harder.
Just ask Mary McHale.
McHale is the principal PM group manager for the Fundamentals Team in Microsoft Digital. She’s in charge of helping Microsoft’s IT and Operations software engineers embrace modern engineering principles, something that doesn’t just happen because it’s the right thing to do.
Microsoft Digital, a combination of the company’s former IT and Operations teams, has been tasked by its leader, Kurt DelBene, to digitally transform and become the company’s fourth engineering organization.
Three years later, that transformation is fully underway.
“It hasn’t been easy,” McHale says, explaining how Microsoft Digital has been mirroring the engineering excellence of Microsoft’s product groups. “Lots of great work has happened, but we’re not done yet—we continue to evolve as new requirements emerge.”
McHale says the company’s internal transformation started with moving Microsoft to the cloud.
“Migrating to Microsoft Azure made everything better,” she says. “It opened new opportunities for us to rethink and re-engineer how we approach our work.”
Everyone across the organization was urged to ask themselves, “Is this an application we need to keep running? Is this work we need to keep doing?”
When the answer was “No,” the team was encouraged to retire or eliminate it.
If it was something they needed to keep, they asked themselves, “Will continuing to run or build the application in the same way aid or accelerate our digital transformation?”
The answers to the latter question were almost always “No,” which made it clear that moving to the cloud offered Microsoft Digital a fresh start.
[Learn more about how McHale’s team is driving Microsoft Digital’s shift to modern engineering. Read about Microsoft’s cloud-centric architecture transformation. Check out how Microsoft is reinventing sales processing and financial reporting with Azure.]
Slashing and burning unneeded apps and experiences
Before the move to the cloud began in earnest over five years ago, Microsoft Digital ran 2,500 applications. Retirement and consolidation of functionality allowed the team to reduce that portfolio by half.
What about the core work that the company needed to keep?
Microsoft Digital lifted and shifted most applications and services to the cloud, moving them as-is to get them there as quickly as possible. But that was only a first step. Now that the company is 97 percent in the cloud, Microsoft Digital’s engineers are rearchitecting those applications and processes to take advantage of everything the cloud has to offer.
Part of McHale’s job is to introduce practices, encourage change, and do whatever’s necessary to help Microsoft Digital’s engineers modernize engineering practices while they also transform the products and services that they use every day.
It’s not easy work.
How do you get more than 2,000 software engineers—each with competing demands and their own idea on how things should be done—to accept transformation?
Keep it simple, McHale says.
Her approach was to define a vision and strategy for embracing modern engineering and to get leaders to align behind that. She used that vision to establish guidance, standards, processes, and tools that helped Microsoft Digital engineering teams tackle transformation in a consistent way supported by metrics.
“The engineering teams all embraced it,” she says. “Once an engineering team got the standards in place and hit our metric, they moved on to the next area of focus, adjusted, and then did it again.”
McHale recognized that everyone in the organization is doing core feature work that shouldn’t be interrupted. So, she and her team got the engineering community to try out the modern engineering techniques while tackling their service improvement backlog, something they spend 20 to 30 percent of their time on.
“We’re already asking them to save a quarter of their time to tackle technical debt, so why not deploy our modern engineering improvements around that,” she says.
Currently, most engineers are using their non-booked capacity to put service monitoring in place to help with escalation management, make their applications accessible, deploy security and privacy fixes, and optimize their services in Azure. The eventual goal is to spend less time on technical debt and more time adopting the latest engineering techniques and technologies as the discipline evolves.
McHale and her team are working hard to keep abreast and share all the evolving practices and technologies so that engineering teams can embrace them on the fly.
“The engineering teams are doing great, and they’re on board,” McHale says. “All of them have been asking for this time to modernize existing services because they know it’s a better way to work. They recognize the value.”
Pouring a foundation for transformation
One significant benefit of approaching transformation in a consistent way, with standard tools, processes, and guidelines, is the creation of an underlying set of metrics that show what success looks like. McHale and her team use these metrics to grade Microsoft Digital’s engineering transformation.
“This is allowing us to measure our progress, to learn, to adjust, to try again, and to keep improving,” she says.
At first, measurement was piecemeal.
“We identified a core set of metrics around engineering hygiene,” McHale says. “We were pulling metrics by hand so we could have a division-wide service review every two weeks.”
They went team by team, asking each group of engineers how they were getting better at addressing technical debt and modernizing how they engineer.
“We went through each team and asked where they were at with these metrics,” she says, explaining that her team settled on tracking 28 metrics to measure the organization’s progress. “In time, we built standardized Microsoft Power BI dashboards that pulled that data automatically and offered drill-downs into each team.”
Those metrics track things like secrets in code, patching compliance, retiring old technologies, and measuring how the team responds to outages.
The engineers within Microsoft Digital have been working hard on many levels to transform the way they work, but that isn’t enough, McHale says. The organization has also had to remove foundational blockers, including an unpredictable funding model owned by the business groups rather than Microsoft Digital, which led to an over-reliance on external contractors for engineering help.
Microsoft Digital’s business partners would request a solution, outline what they wanted, and provide funding. Microsoft Digital would then build what was asked or, in some cases, the business partners would build it themselves.
What happened when a hands-on business partner wanted a handful of new features built in a very specific way?
No problem.
Microsoft Digital would build them, even when similar solutions were being built elsewhere in the division or company.
“We were considered order takers,” she says. “We weren’t thinking about the non-coherent experiences we were providing for our employee users—we were making sure our business customer got what they were paying for, and success was building more and more features.”
To make matters worse, the organization was so reliant on vendor software engineers to do the work that even if people wanted to get their work in alignment, they would have a hard time doing it because they had no way to know if the funding for those vendor software engineers would be there next year.
“We had an overreliance on vendors, which limited our oversight when it came to engineering excellence and producing the end-to-end experiences that we were looking to build,” McHale says.
Embracing modern engineering
McHale and her team have a clear goal.
“We want to deliver capabilities and solutions at a faster pace and with high quality, reliability, and security,” she says. “To achieve this, we’re modernizing how we build, deploy, and manage our services to get new functionality in our users’ hands as rapidly as possible.”
And it’s working.
The change management itself was relatively easy, McHale says. Microsoft Digital’s engineers want to be the best at modern engineering—moving away from specialization, developing faster without causing harm, and learning from continuous data insights.
“Everyone has got behind what we’re trying to do,” she says. “It’s been like pushing an open door. It’s really coming down to helping our engineering teams figure out what to prioritize—they’re that much on board.”
That’s what makes all the work worth it, she says.
“I look back at where we have come from, and I think we’ve made so much progress,” she says. “We’re working hard at becoming a world-class engineering org, and it’s paying off. We share a huge sense of achievement in terms of what we’ve done here, and we’re eager to share our journey with our customers.”
Learn more about how McHale’s team is driving Microsoft Digital’s shift to modern engineering.
Read about Microsoft’s cloud-centric architecture transformation.
Check out how Microsoft is reinventing sales processing and financial reporting with Azure.
