Just ask James Gagnon.

He’ll tell you that good engineering teams at Microsoft and in Microsoft Digital are driving towards using DevOps to do their work, and with good reason.

“DevOps is a foundational part of actually achieving digital transformation, of becoming truly agile,” says Gagnon, a software engineering lead on the Microsoft Digital team delivering finance applications inside Microsoft.

Moving to DevOps can be as simple as combining software engineering and support roles, then delivering smaller software increments. That seems easy enough, but here at Microsoft, Gagnon and others driving this kind of transformation often find that organizational boundaries, team culture, and business processes must also evolve to get people to buy into this modern approach to engineering.

Gagnon has seen this story play out over the last six years.

“There is no doubt that implementing DevOps will increase the speed and quality of software delivery, but it will cost you everything if done in isolation,” Gagnon says.

Leaders must burn old practices

“DevOps thrives with increased autonomy,” Gagnon says. “Empowering teams to measure, deliver, fail, learn, and improve internally will yield greater outcomes. Leaders that measure outcomes over execution governance will give their teams the freedom to innovate while taking greater accountability of their work.”

Gagnon says that team productivity measures and processes such as sprint burndowns, velocity, work in progress limits, and story pointing must be private to the sprint team. He says leaders should enable these basic practices and ensure they are in place, but they should also make sure the data stays with the team.

“This creates a safe environment to reflect and enables continuous improvement,” he says. “Leaders that create aggregate reports and force specific practices will create a culture of gamification. Reports and scorecards will become more important to the engineers than the outcomes and the customers.”

Leaders who control and over-centralize solutions will frustrate engineering teams and impact their ability to deliver working software with agility, Gagnon says.

“DevOps transformation starts with software transformation and culture transformation,” he says.  “The sprint team knows best the debt that is impacting the team and is best suited to partner with business and leadership to define the roadmap.”

Delivery of schedule driven projects is a legacy success metric of the waterfall software delivery lifecycle. Gagnon has been part of this and learned the hard way that it doesn’t work.

“I’ve seen the perfect software engineering storm and it was a long nasty ride,” he says. “Leadership had set a date for achieving transformation. The engineering team changed structurally with new undocumented expectations. Engineers had to modernize monolithic legacy software, originally built on a tight budget, all while success was measured by new business feature delivery and quality. Unfortunately, leadership was the first and only thing to change.”

How it works—the UAT example

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is one of the areas causing excessive toil when moving to an agile or modern engineering culture, Gagnon says. Many times, these legacy software engineering practices have been part of the release process for years and compliance validation or other factors required the business stakeholder to review and approve changes. When left in place, this conflicts with the goals of DevOps in general.

“The UAT process alone has huge implications in our ability to move towards DevOps, it’s simply not compatible. Engineering of the current feature sprint can’t stop while UAT happens for the previous feature sprint,” he says. “This is supposed to be faster, right?”

The changes required to move away from UAT need to happen both in engineering teams and the business teams.

“Engineers must take full accountability for quality and business stakeholders must be integral to the process,” Gagnon says. “Achieving the agreed upon success criteria defined at the beginning of a sprint must be demonstrated by a simple sprint review as part of closing the sprint.”

Not only does a UAT process slow down agile methodology, it creates code line management complexity, he says. This requires a separate integration step, an additional branch, and slows down development with increased cost.

“Modern engineering can’t be achieved when managing branches that map to legacy process,” Gagnon says. “We must deliver to production what was engineered within the same sprint.”

People make it happen

Just as culture needs to transform, the software engineers who make up that culture do as well. At Microsoft it started by combining the development and testing role, and now the company is merging the service engineering role into this DevOps role as well.

“The goal is to drive end to end accountability into the software engineering discipline,” Gagnon says. “This is crucial to the service view and achieving modern engineering practices.”

It’s a transition that’s harder than it looks.

“This isn’t simply a matter of learning a few new technical skills, but, also soft skills,” he says. “Writing code is just one expectation.”

Engineers need to work closely with business partners, manage more aspects of a project, and collaborate with other team members.

“I’d love to hire the mythical unicorn, someone who understands quality, who understands security, who can code, and who can communicate with others,” Gagnon says. “These candidates are far and few between. I hire for the basics across all required areas and seek diversity across the team for specialization. This approach has helped balance the team where everyone can contribute within the DevOps model.”

Putting it all together

Gagnon says proper implementation of DevOps has required multiple adaptations to culture and processes at all levels in Microsoft.

“It’s helping to drive our transformation,” he says. “It’s not only moving the organization forward, but the people as well. It’s driving a shift to centralize on outcomes over solutions, which enables DevOps engineers to truly own and take pride in their work.”

It’s the kind of thing that fires you up, and sends old, outdated practices up in smoke.

“I’ve never been more excited about what’s possible at Microsoft than right now,” Gagnon says “The transformation is occurring throughout leadership, which is making it easier for our engineering teams to realize their goals and have fun while doing it.”

• Explore how deploying Kanban at Microsoft leads to engineering excellence.
• Discover how rotating DevOps role improves engineering service quality.
• Unpack how DevOps development model makes Microsoft more nimble, productive.

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MyWorkspace is a browser-based cloud-provisioning tool created by MSD to allow Microsoft employees to rapidly deploy Azure-based infrastructure environments for solution testing and development tasks. From the most basic configuration to massive, complex environments, MyWorkspace provides an interface that simplifies the process of creating and deploying Azure resources. MyWorkspace users can create custom environments from scratch or use built-in templates to replicate existing Azure environments.

MyWorkspace provides more than 10,000 monthly active users across almost 75 countries and regions with access to Azure environments that serve as the foundation for the solutions we develop for our customers and employees.

We developed MyWorkspace to replace a preexisting virtual machine deployment solution designed for on-premises deployment. MyWorkspace was born in Azure and engineered to take advantage of modern cloud technology and modern development practices.

However, My Workspace wasn’t an overnight success. Our engineers and development teams have used an iterative approach to build MyWorkspace into the robust and intuitive experience its users enjoy today.

[Explore moving Microsoft’s global network to the cloud with Azure. Read our ongoing series on moving our network to the cloud.]

Creating a high-performance, responsive UI on Azure infrastructure

We built MyWorkspace on modern frameworks and technologies, including React and Typescript. The capabilities of the modern platform enabled our developers to prioritize performance and the user experience, even at the early stages of the development process.

Creating a fast and responsive user experience was a top priority for MyWorkspace. Reducing latency and user interface delays translates to fewer disruptions, less downtime, and improved productivity for users and administrators. We used Lighthouse—an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages—to monitor and improve critical metrics for MyWorkspace. These metrics formed the core data set we used to gauge the performance, accessibility, and design of MyWorkspace. Using the Core Web Vitals metrics from Lighthouse, we could constantly and accurately assess the changes we made to MyWorkspace.

Moving our hosting to Azure Static Web Apps significantly improved our performance. At the beginning of our development process, we used Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) containers, which were localized to Azure regions in the US.

We used Azure Static Web Apps to automatically distribute our static web assets across geographically dispersed points, creating a consistent performance experience across the countries and regions MyWorkspace serves. Some users experienced performance improvements of more than 800 percent. The migration to Azure Static Web Apps also allowed us to take advantage of the enterprise-grade Azure internet edge, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, efficient caching, and file compression.

To improve loading times, we implemented code splitting. Rather than bundling all JavaScript code into a single large file, we split it into smaller chunks and load only the necessary code segments as they’re needed. This approach reduces initial load times and ensures a more responsive experience.

We meticulously scrutinized our assets, especially those originating from third-party libraries. By minimizing the use of external dependencies and optimizing JavaScript bundles, we reduced the payload size. Fewer assets means faster loading, decreased latency, and improved overall performance. We tracked and visualized our application’s bundle size over time with Azure Application Insights logs and a PowerBI dashboard.

MyWorkspace simplifies Azure resource management for users by abstracting away Azure-specific complexities through an intuitive UI. However, handling frequent or long-running changes associated with Azure resources poses challenges. In the past, we relied on database polling—a method involving periodic queries to check resource status. Unfortunately, this approach led to unnecessary network traffic and delays in updates.

We used the Azure SignalR service to handle the complexities of Azure resource interactions. Azure SignalR is a managed cloud service that simplifies real-time communication between a server and multiple clients, enabling dynamic and responsive applications at scale.

By using Azure SignalR with the Cosmos DB Change Feed Listener, our backend service promptly notifies the UI of any relevant database changes. Additionally, we have extended our SignalR service with a notification microservice, enabling us to provide relevant toast notifications to users. These notifications provide information about the status of their long-running events, such as Azure resource deployments.

Through the above techniques, the MyWorkspace Lighthouse score has increased from approximately 50 to more than 80 (out of 100). To maintain the consistent monitoring required for a high-performance application like MyWorkspace, we continually monitor Lighthouse scores using Azure Application Insights and a custom PowerBI dashboard.

Prioritizing the inclusivity and the employee experience

The development team uses heuristic evaluation, inclusive usability studies, and automated accessibility testing to ensure a usable and intuitive experience for every employee. We also use the Microsoft Fluent design system, a collection of user experience (UX) guidelines, best practices, and code examples for creating beautiful and engaging experiences across devices and platforms.

The MyWorkspace team adopted a shift-left mindset for accessibility testing, which means we integrated accessibility testing into our development process as early and as often as possible rather than waiting until the end of the project. With the shift-left approach, accessibility issues are detected and corrected before they reach production, reducing time spent on manual testing, improving overall accessibility testing consistency, and reducing feature delivery time.

To adopt shift-left, the MyWorkspace team integrated the Accessibility Insights for CI/CD tool into their end-to-end test suite. Accessibility Insights is an open-source project created by Microsoft that enables developers to scan their web apps for common accessibility issues using the Axe Core accessibility testing engine. By using Accessibility Insights for CI/CD, the MyWorkspace team automated the accessibility testing of their application and ensured that it met the WCAG 2.1 AA level of conformance, making the application easier to navigate and understand for all users.

Building for the future

Understanding the changing needs and demands of MyWorkspace is critical to understanding how the platform needs to change and grow. We’re using One Customer Voice—based on Dynamics 365 Customer Voice—to gather rapid and consistent feedback from MyWorkspace users to help anticipate future needs.

One Customer Voice allows for in-context, one-click feedback from users, simplifying the feedback process and creating a larger and more accurate sample size for user feedback. One Customer Voice also provides targeted in-context surveys that can be presented to users to gather more detailed feedback. It all combines to create a dashboard where our teams can better understand user sentiment and satisfaction and use that data to continue to build a better MyWorkspace product.

As MyWorkspace usage increases—and our scope of work with it—we’re offering more and more capabilities. The scalable nature of our modern engineering platform in Azure allows us to easily support this growth by keeping our codebase healthy and focusing on modularity in design.

We’re excited about the future of MyWorkspace and the opportunities our modern approach has given us to grow and adapt our solution along with Microsoft’s business needs. If you find this useful, we encourage you to consider building a similar browser-based cloud-provisioning tool at your company.

Key takeaways

Here are a few tips for developing your own MyWorkspace-like solution:

• Embrace cloud technology for agility and scale. Use modern cloud services like Azure to rapidly deploy and manage your infrastructure and enhance your team’s productivity. Explore browser-based cloud-provisioning tools to speed up your development and testing cycles, ensuring your team can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management.
• Prioritize performance from the start. Focus on creating a fast and responsive user experience. Use tools like Lighthouse to monitor and improve your web applications’ performance, accessibility, and user experience. Consider adopting practices such as code splitting and minimizing external dependencies to reduce load times and enhance responsiveness.
• Integrate accessibility and inclusivity into your development process. Integrate accessibility testing early and often in your development cycle. Use tools like Accessibility Insights for CI/CD to automate testing and ensure your applications are accessible to all users. Adopting a shift-left approach to accessibility can help detect and correct issues before they impact users, improving your projects’ overall quality and inclusiveness.
• Collect and act on user feedback for continuous improvement. Use tools like Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to gather real-time feedback, better understand user needs, anticipate future demands, and continuously refine your product. Encourage your team to embrace feedback as a valuable resource for driving innovation and maintaining relevance.

Learn how to build your own Azure Static Web App.

• Explore moving Microsoft’s global network to the cloud with Azure.
• Read our ongoing series on moving our network to the cloud.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

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Whether our employees are in neighboring cities or different continents, they need to communicate and collaborate efficiently with each other. We designed our Microsoft Azure-based virtual wide-area network (VWAN) architecture to provide high-performance networking across our global presence, enabling reliable and security-focused connectivity for all Microsoft employees, wherever they are.

We’re using Azure to strategically position enterprise services such as the campus internet edge in closer proximity to end users and improve network performance. These performance improvements are streamlining our site connectivity worldwide and improving the user experience, increasing user satisfaction and operational efficiency.

We’ve recently piloted this VWAN architecture with our Microsoft Johannesburg office. Our users in Johannesburg were experiencing latency issues and sub-optimal network performance relating to outbound internet connections routed through London and Dublin in Europe. In other words, employees had to go to another continent in order to reach the internet.

To simplify the network path for outgoing internet traffic and reduce latency, we migrated outbound traffic for two network segments in Johannesburg to the Azure Edge using a VWAN connected through Azure ExpressRoute circuits.

The solution relocates the internet edge for Johannesburg to the South Africa North region datacenter in South Africa, using Azure Firewall, Azure ExpressRoute, Azure Connection Monitor, and Azure VWAN. We’ve also evolved our DNS resolution strategy to a hybrid solution that hosts DNS services in Azure, which increases our scalability and resiliency on DNS resolution services for Johannesburg users. We’ve deployed the entire solution adhering to our infrastructure as code strategy, creating a flexible network infrastructure that can adapt and scale to evolving demands on the VWAN.

We’re using Azure Network Watcher connection monitor and Broadcom AppNeta to monitor the entire solution end-to-end. These tools will be critical in evaluating the VWAN’s performance, enabling data-driven decisions for optimizing network performance.

The accompanying high-level diagram outlines our updated network flows. We can support distinct user groups by isolating the guest virtual route forwarding zone (red lines) and the internet virtual route forwarding zone (black lines). This design underscores our commitment to robust outbound traffic control, ensuring a secure and optimized network environment.

We strongly believe our VWAN-based architecture represents the future of global connectivity. The agility, scalability, and resiliency of VWAN infrastructure enables increased collaboration, productivity, and efficiency across our regional offices.

Our pilot in Johannesburg proved that improvements in network performance directly affected user experience. By relocating the network edge to the South Africa region in Azure instead of our datacenter edge in London/Dublin, latency for connections from Johannesburg to other public endpoints in South Africa has dropped from 170 milliseconds to 1.3 milliseconds.

Latency for other network paths has also improved, but by lesser amounts depending on the specific destination. The improvements were always greater the closer the destination was to Johannesburg, including connectivity paths to the United States and Europe, demonstrating stability and reliability in these critical connections. Significant benefits of the VWAN solution include:

• Increased scalability and flexibility. Our architecture is built to scale with our business needs. Whether we have a handful of regional buildings or a continent, the VWAN solution can accommodate any dynamic growth pattern. As our service offering expands, we can easily add new locations and integrate them seamlessly into the VWAN infrastructure.
• Greater network resilience. Continuous connectivity is essential to effective productivity and collaboration. Our architecture incorporates redundancy and failover mechanisms to ensure network resilience. In case of a network disruption or hardware failure, the VWAN solution automatically reroutes traffic to alternative paths, minimizing downtime and maintaining uninterrupted communication.
• Improved security and compliance. Protecting our data and ensuring compliance is our top priority. Our VWAN-based architecture is secure by design that incorporates industry-leading security measures, including encryption, network segmentation, and access controls. We adhere to the highest security standards that help Microsoft safeguard sensitive information in transit and meet compliance requirements.

We’re currently planning our VWAN-based architecture to span multiple global regions, offering extensive coverage and enabling our employees to connect to their regional and global services through the Azure network backbone as we continue prioritizing network performance to deliver exceptional connectivity for voice, data, and other critical applications.

We’re working to build improvements into the architecture for more optimized routing, improved Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms, and advanced traffic management techniques to minimize latency, packet loss, and jitter, ensuring robust and low-latency connections to facilitate seamless communication regardless of where our employees are located.

Contact us today to explore how our cutting-edge VWAN-based architecture can transform your organization’s networking capabilities and revolutionize how your employees connect and communicate globally. Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you with more information.

• Assess your organization’s current network performance and needs to understand the challenges remote employees and satellite offices face regarding latency and connectivity.
• Incorporate Microsoft Azure for improved scalability, flexibility, and resilience so you can strategically position cloud services near end users, improving latency and overall user experience.
• Adopt an infrastructure-as-code approach to deploy flexible virtual network infrastructures. This streamlines the deployment process and ensures adaptability to ever-changing network demands.
• Invest in monitoring tools to gain valuable insights into the VWAN’s performance, which will help you make data-driven decisions for optimization.
• Adopt a VWAN-based architecture that emphasizes security measures such as encryption, network segmentation, and strict access controls. Ensure that the architecture adheres to the highest security standards, safeguarding sensitive information and meeting compliance requirements.
• Keep updated on advancements in network routing, Quality of Service mechanisms, and traffic management techniques. This will help you minimize latency and ensure robust, low-latency connections, enhancing global communication for your employees.

Get started at our company by learning how to deploy Azure VWAN with routing intent and routing policies.

• Discover deploying a VWAN using infrastructure as code and CI/CD.
• Learn more about building a secure and efficient self-service application using Azure services.
• Explore the learnings, pitfalls, and compromises of Microsoft’s expedition to the cloud.
• Unpack verifying device health at Microsoft with Zero Trust.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Boosting employee connectivity with Microsoft Azure-based VWAN architecture appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“We were no exceptions,” says David Johnson, principal product manager architect, who leads the team that governs how Microsoft 365 is deployed across Microsoft. “Microsoft 365 started changing every day, and we needed to figure out how to keep up.”

The transition to living in this new Software as a Service (SaaS) world was further complicated by the global pandemic and ever evolving work style changes. The ongoing pandemic and its uncertain duration meant that organizations had to remain agile and responsive to the shifting needs of their workforce. IT teams had to continuously evaluate and implement new technologies and cloud-based solutions to facilitate remote collaboration, enable seamless communication, and maintain productivity. As a result of remote work, employees embraced asynchronous workflows, allowing for flexibility around when and where work could be completed.

Now with the help of generative AI, employees can utilize products like Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams Meeting Recap to reduce meeting fatigue and prioritize workloads.

To learn more about generative AI improving the employee experience, check out our spotlight on the digital transformation series.

The pressure on IT administrators at Microsoft and everywhere increased tremendously.

It’s a hot topic for customers—how do I decide what I’m going to turn on for my company effectively? From an industry perspective, this is a fairly important conversation.

—David Johnson, principal product manager architect, Microsoft Digital

“This was a lot to absorb for an industry that had previously thrived on consistency, reliability, and predictability,” says Johnson.

Change became the new constant, and dealing with that level of change is something everyone is still getting used to.

“It’s a hot topic for customers,” says Johnson, whose team has been at the forefront of both the industry shift to the cloud and the tech demands of a new mobile workforce. “How do I decide what I’m going to turn on for my company effectively? From an industry perspective, this is a fairly important conversation.”

Microsoft Teams alone has hundreds of new features and changes in development at any given time. The rest of the Microsoft 365 suite—which includes Microsoft Office apps, hosted email, and the Microsoft SharePoint glue connecting it all—has also seen rapid changes.

Johnson’s goal was to handle the change management for all Microsoft 365 products in the same way. His team’s approach falls along getting three things right: initial triage, putting guardrails in place to allow innovation, and staying current on the latest news.

Triage for an upcoming change

IT administrators largely control what changes become available to employees, who in the workforce can see those experiences, and how to configure for them. Sometimes updates are relatively easy to deploy, such as adding the ability to raise a virtual hand in a Microsoft Teams meeting. Other times, they might involve trickier issues such as artificial intelligence or data mining—and then the concept of triage becomes paramount.

Broadly speaking, Microsoft’s internal triage involves two basic concepts: developing a posture—a set of IT principles for your company—and ensuring that features or change management fit within that posture. A posture could define the levels of security and data privacy needed, for example Microsoft 365’s compliance capabilities, such as data loss prevention (DLP), information protection, and eDiscovery, allowed major financial institutions to align their IT environment with their defined compliance posture. They implemented robust data protection measures, including encryption and access management, to safeguard sensitive financial information. Additionally, they used advanced threat protection features to detect and respond to potential security incidents proactively.

When that posture is in place, triaging against it becomes easier. The first step is to evaluate what’s coming and determine how significant the change is, then run the change through a series of questions that reflect a company’s IT posture, such as these:

• Does this need a security review?
• Do you need to run this by your privacy experts?
• What are the legal implications of turning this feature on?
• Does your human resources team need to be involved?
• Will the workers council or union need to be involved?
• What is the IT manageability impact? Are there any IT resource impacts?
• Are there employee experience implications that you’ll need to communicate?

[Transforming Data Governance at Microsoft with Purview and Fabric. Discover implementing a Zero Trust security model at Microsoft. Explore how Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365. Unpack upgrading Microsoft’s core Human Resources system with SAP SuccessFactors.]

Guardrails to encourage innovation and collaboration

Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about privacy and security, but just as crucial to the company are the creativity, innovation, and collaboration that take place within its workforce.

One of Microsoft’s most important postures is maintaining the sometimes tricky balance between protecting employees and allowing them to chat freely and to share files and collaborate across multiple platforms. To keep that balance, the company relies on the concept of guardrails that maintain security and privacy while giving people room to move.

One way to test the balance between security and innovation is by using an internal ring structure to deploy change management. There is a natural first ring of testers comprised of the engineering and supporting teams that worked closely with the solution. The internal ring structure allows the people who are most familiar with the solution to validate it before it’s shared with the second ring.

The second ring of initial users is where some of the most important testing takes place, and as a feature matures, it gradually sees broader distribution. At Microsoft, a group of employees who are enthusiastic about new features has signed up to see early deployments. That group, called Microsoft Elite, often comprises one of the earliest rings.

The ring structure can be used for any IT department that wants to slowly roll out changes and monitor the effects prior to impacting users on a broad scale.

“The team that manages the deployment of Microsoft Exchange internally at Microsoft uses rings to try out new features before they are broadly deployed across the company” says Nate Carson, a senior service manager who helps manage the company’s internal use of Microsoft Exchange.

“It lessens the impact to the broader company by doing it this way,” Carson says.

Using rings to try-it-before-you-deploy-it also gives security and data privacy teams more time to assess the impact of a new feature. That’s crucial for change management in the era of relentless hacking, ransomware, phishing, and other security attacks.

Companies need to be more aware of software features that are being released and understand how they might impact digital security.

—Lee Peterson, principal manager, Microsoft emerging technology standards and assurance

“There is an explosion of data and really an explosion of hackers trying to get at your data,” says Faye Harold, principal program manager for information protection services on the Digital Security and Resilience (DSR) team in Microsoft Digital. She spends most of her time thinking about hackers and trying to outwit them. Because the end user is the last line of defense for information security, she also watches how those users respond to new features. “It’s mind-boggling how many attack vectors there are, and it’s all centered on people and their identities,” Harold says.

“Microsoft has a set of security principles it has shared with product groups”, says Lee Peterson, principal manager in DSR for emerging technology standards and assurance. There are expectations around data protection, and when a change or new feature is coming down the pipeline, he watches to see how it might impact the company’s security posture.

“Companies need to be more aware of software features that are being released and understand how they might impact digital security,” he says.

Staying on top of the news

The events of the pandemic show how quickly things can change for companies of all sizes. That’s why it’s important to be aware of the latest communications from software and service developers. Microsoft relies on a Microsoft 365 Message Center to keep customers aware of changes that impact the Microsoft Office 365 environment. It’s a link on the left side of the admin portal, and it provides important news, detailed information, and visual indications of items that require an administrator’s attention. It can describe the specific actions that administrators need to take for change management and the timeframes for those changes.

“Another way to stay current on products and features is by checking in with the docs.microsoft.com site” says Darren Moffatt, senior service engineer for Microsoft 365.

“It’s pretty much our encyclopedia of everything Microsoft,” Moffatt says. “It can be super technical, but it can also have good documentation on simply how a feature works from a visual perspective. So my advice is: if there are customers, especially admins that have not made reviewing docs.microsoft.com part of their cadence or made a habit of checking it out and going to it as their reference, do that.”

Microsoft has made it easier for organizations to handle their Message Center with the help of Planner. By bringing the Message Center and Planner together, companies can now evaluate if a message could potentially affect their operations. This integration allows them to quickly assess the importance of each message and assign it to the right person for further review if needed. With Planner’s assistance, the triage process becomes smoother, ensuring that all relevant messages are carefully examined and addressed promptly.

Learn more about staying on top of important announcements from the message center with Microsoft Planner.

The changing face of IT

As the modern workforce continues to shift productivity and resources to the cloud, IT is no longer just focused on tech support. It’s now deeply involved in business enablement and improving the bottom line.

IT historically was separated into silos. The Microsoft SharePoint people were in one, and the Microsoft Exchange people were in another, and everyone had their distinct roles. But those boundaries have come down as software has enabled more collaboration. Now, working in IT means having knowledge across disciplines, and Microsoft wants to immerse employees in different areas and give them experiences that help build broader skill sets and handle change management, Moffatt says. So, when change comes at you fast—as it often does—more of the team is ready to respond.

“Microsoft has also really pushed everybody so that every quarter you don’t just get to sit on your laurels,” he says. “You do have to be very clear about how you’re going to learn and grow as an employee.”

Employees don’t see the boundaries between the services, according to Johnson. They see the boundaries across scenarios, and those scenarios are now starting to blend.

“All of these services converged because our employee scenarios converged,” he says. “Collaboration doesn’t start or end at a meeting. Voice call is no longer just a voice call; it’s now a chat and files that you’re sharing. That’s why you converge a lot of these experiences to enable effectively a more complete package for your employees.”

In a broader context, continuous improvements in change management, security, and collaboration facilitated by Microsoft 365 can indirectly contribute to enhancing AI experiences. As organizations adopt efficient change management practices, stay updated with the latest features and updates, and strike a balance between security and innovation, they create an environment that is conducive to leveraging AI technologies effectively. This allows organizations to embrace AI-driven solutions, streamline processes, and deliver more personalized and efficient AI experiences to their users.

• Evaluate upcoming changes ahead of schedule. Consider factors like security, privacy, legal compliance, HR policies, and IT manageability to ensure a smooth transition.
• Stay informed about the latest news and updates that impact your service environment.
• Gradually deploy changes using a ring structure, starting with internal testing and expanding to a broader audience.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

• Transforming Data Governance at Microsoft with Purview and Fabric.
• Discover implementing a Zero Trust security model at Microsoft.
• Explore how Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365.
• Unpack upgrading Microsoft’s core Human Resources system with SAP SuccessFactors.

The post Transforming change management at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

As a company, we have evolved from using a process-centered, rigid, manual operations model with a disconnected customer experience. We moved to a Microsoft Azure-based model that uses modern engineering principles such as scalability, agility, and self-service that are focused on the customer experience.

Our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) team is leading the company on a bold, three-step strategy to build best-in-class platforms and productivity services for the mobile-first, cloud-first world. This strategy harmonizes the interests of users, developers, and IT.

To effectively deliver on the strategy, we needed to rethink our infrastructure and operations platforms, tools, engineering methods, and business processes to create a collaborative organization that can deliver cohesive and scalable solutions.

[Explore instrumenting ServiceNow with Azure Monitor. | Discover modernizing enterprise integration services using Azure. | Unpack implementing Azure cost optimization for the enterprise.]

Our operations history

Like most IT organizations, our traditional hosting services were mostly physical, on-premises environments that consisted of servers, storage, and network devices. Most of the devices were owned and maintained for specific business functions. The technologies were very diverse and needed specialized skills to design, deploy, and run.

Traditional IT technologies, processes, and teams

Server technologies included discrete servers and densely built computing racks with blade servers. Storage technologies used direct-attached storage (DAS) and storage area networks (SANs). Networks used a variety of technologies, from simple switches to more advanced load balancers, encryption, and firewall devices. Platform technologies ranged from Windows, SQL Server, BizTalk, and SharePoint farms to third-party solutions such as SAP and other information security–related tool sets. Server virtualization evolved from Hyper-V to System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Orchestrator.

To provide a stable infrastructure, we needed a structured framework, such as IT Infrastructure Library/Managed Object Format (ITIL/MOF). Policies, processes, and procedures in the framework helped to enforce, control, and prevent failures. Engineering groups that used hosting services had a similar adoption process for their application and service needs, based on ITIL/MOF and combined with a synchronous data link control (SDLC)/waterfall framework.

Teams formed naturally around people with similar core strengths in the ITIL areas of service strategy, service design, service operations, and service transition, as shown in the graphic below.

Traditional hosted environments relied on external sources of space, power, connectivity, hardware, and software. And the technologies behind these sources evolved slowly. A common framework of policies and procedures helped bring teams together to refine and unify procedures. Tools were developed to formalize, track, audit, and measure procedures. The culture of the organization helped build a process-oriented, structured way of getting things done.

Challenges of traditional IT

Although ITIL/MOF helped streamline some processes, the complexities, constraints, and dependencies of traditional hosting prevented agile engineering. For example, it usually took six to nine months to build a new development environment for an application or service team. This time included planning, coordinating resources, tracking issues, and mitigating risk. Although the structure added clarity in delivery, it removed business agility.

Long-term managed services offered opportunities to build cost efficiency. But, because of the way processes were implemented, functional roles were often duplicated. This created an overall negative impact on time and cost.

When our engineering teams used SDLC waterfall methods and operations teams used ITIL/MOF, adhering to process took priority over delivering iterative, agile solutions to meet targeted business needs. These processes slowed business throughput significantly. Solutions were developed and deployed over years instead of months.

Phase 1: Improving operational efficiency

Our MDEE team plays a pivotal role in the company’s new strategy, as most business processes in the company depend on us. To help Microsoft transform, we identified key focus areas to improve in the first phase of our transformation: improving business agility, reducing costs, learning new skills, and inventing new ways to work.

The graphic below shows the steps we took to get to Microsoft Azure.

Infrastructure Platform. An agile business demands agile infrastructure, fewer physical servers, and moving to/innovating in Microsoft Azure.

Strategy. Migrating to the cloud highlighted the need for build, change, and policy management processes as self-service capabilities. Our approach is to use software to automate provisioning, management, and coordination of services, so our Microsoft business partners can develop and deploy services faster with less work and lower cost.

Structure. We had to rethink the way that our teams and roles delivered this strategy by integrating different teams that did similar tasks. This allowed us to effectively design and deliver end-to-end service offerings at lower cost. Our organization was restructured to form teams that optimize service and infrastructure. These teams learn new skills, work harmoniously with engineering, and reduce waste.

Culture. We embraced a growth mindset, learned new skills, built new capabilities, and found new ways to work.

Mission. It became our mission to define, deliver, and transform how we work by helping engineers build solutions tailored to the hybrid cloud world.

Realigning our organization

Services optimization. This team helps our business partners to provision and manage their own IT services. We have improved operational agility and reliability, which has resulted in specific benefits:

• Less manual effort per release/update
• Shorter lead time
• More frequent builds and deployment
• Increased service quality
• Reduced security exposure

We elevated our teams by training people and hiring others with the engineering skills we need. Our goal is to gradually transition people from operational skills to service engineering skills.

A deeper analysis of our operational model also revealed redundant processes in service design, service transition, and service operations. After careful consideration, we reduced process overhead by eliminating or automating some processes. This restructuring presents a business opportunity to consolidate vendor teams. Many of our sustained workloads will decrease year over year, as on-premises infrastructure shrinks.

Infrastructure Optimization. This team eliminates duplicate infrastructure, reduces our footprint, and modernizes infrastructure for our business partners by reducing hosting costs. Key outcomes of this work include:

• Consolidated datacenters
• Fewer physical and traditional virtual machines
• Smaller storage consumption
• Increased cloud adoption

When teams started working together to optimize infrastructure, they found duplicate projects with similar goals. After we cut redundant projects, people were freed up to learn project management skills and to engage with our business partners.

This team took a program-based delivery approach with start and end dates. After provisioning was automated, we worked with our business partners so they could use new self-service tools to take ownership of their infrastructure. The new self-service features helped our business partners identify and decommission unused servers. Self-service planning eliminates manual handoffs, and enables our business partners to manage risks, issues, and blockers. Our business partners also found that they no longer needed vendors to manage hand-offs.

Reinventing our culture

To reinvent ourselves, we needed to change. We stopped managing processes and began trusting our business partners and empowering engineers. We defined our new mindset and goals to:

• Focus on the customer by designing and building new services from their perspective.
• Challenge and question the status quo, and rethink old processes and behaviors.
• Experiment and learn so we can produce innovative cloud technologies using agile methods.
• Collaborate beyond our organizational boundaries to identify and deliver the right solution for our business partners.
• Deliver faster and fix issues faster.

The business outcome

Combined, all the changes we made produced tangible results. We improved our agility and enabled our Microsoft business partners to deploy services faster with less work at a reduced cost. We were able to:

• Reduce manual work by about 60 percent.
• Migrate 10 percent of the IT ecosystem to the public cloud (Azure IaaS).
• Decommission on-premises data centers across the pre-production ecosystem.
• Optimize about 42 percent of our global workforce.
• Save about $6.5 million in organization operational costs.

Lessons learned in Phase 1

Through this process of technological and cultural evolution, we learned that:

• Next-generation, modern applications will come from innovating in Microsoft Azure. A private cloud cannot provide the innovations and scale that Azure can.
• There are a multitude of technical requirements to help our Microsoft business partners migrate to Microsoft Azure.
• Tools that support the private cloud don’t scale for Microsoft Azure, which significantly impacts agility.
• Processes established for a private cloud cause a fragmented and disconnected experience in Microsoft Azure.
• Capability gaps to connect Microsoft Azure inventory, utilization, and cost led to drastic increase in Azure operational cost.

Phase 2: Delivering value through innovation

To effectively harness the benefits of Microsoft Azure, we migrated 90 percent of our IT infrastructure to Azure and then balanced the business need for innovation with efficient operation. We decided to use native cloud solutions, phase out customized IT tool sets, and decentralize and simplify operations processes as we adopt the DevOps model.

Changing roles

Microsoft Azure DevOps is a work model that integrates software developers and IT operations. As we move to the cloud, IT infrastructure support is drastically reduced. Going forward, we offer the most value to our business partners by adopting Infrastructure as Code to achieve friction-free interaction with engineering teams and support continuous deployment. We redefined operations roles and retrained people from traditional IT roles to be business relationship managers, engineering program managers, service engineers, and software engineers:

• Business relationship managers engage with our Microsoft business partners to understand their needs and to tailor Microsoft Azure capabilities for their business needs. Business relationship managers listen, prioritize, and manage expectations across business, infrastructure, and Azure teams.
• Engineering program managers design and deliver solutions in partnership with software engineers, service engineers, and business relationship managers.
• Software and service engineers focus on developing reliable, scalable, and high-quality automated services, which eliminates much manual work. As we retrained people from operational to engineering and relational skills, we saw a gradual uptick in engagement with our business partners.

Simplifying operational processes

In the past, the processes that Microsoft used to manage corporate inventory, procurement, software development, security management, financial management—and other functions—were disconnected from each other and confined within organization boundaries. And existing processes and tools resulted in long wait times for simple IT tasks.

A simple application infrastructure took at least 40 days to provision, and complex applications with multiple dependencies could take over a year. The traditional IT mindset, processes, and obsolete tools had a negative impact on software engineering productivity. IT operations processes were realigned as shown in the graphic below.

Microsoft Azure radically simplified our IT operations. Simple projects can be provisioned in Azure within one day, and complex projects can be provisioned in six days. We increased our speed 40-fold by eliminating, streamlining, and connecting processes, and by aligning processes for Azure.

Adopting native cloud solutions

We are retiring many customized IT tools and focusing on native cloud solutions using Microsoft Azure Infrastructure as Code within the Microsoft Azure Resource Manager (ARM) fabric. By using ARM templates, APIs, and PowerShell (as well as integrating developer tools) we can rapidly provision a hosting platform.

We also adopted software-defined networking (SDN) by developing APIs to dynamically procure Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute load balancing and traffic managing capabilities, which connect, secure, and route traffic and improve application responsiveness. Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is primarily used for lift-and-shift migration of virtual machines.

Microsoft Azure Operations Management Suite (OMS) is a Software as a Service (SaaS)-based, cross-platform solution with capabilities that span analytics, automation, configuration, security, backup, and disaster recovery. OMS is designed for speed, flexibility, and simplicity and effectively manages windows servers and Linux in a hybrid cloud environment.

The graphic below shows how native cloud solutions allow many traditional IT processes to become self-service.

ICM is the Incident Management System for Microsoft. With high-availability cloud support, and cloud‑based access, we now support Microsoft Azure and many other services across Microsoft.

Cloud Cruiser, a third-party SaaS application, gives us valuable financial information and reports about our Microsoft Azure usage and spending in near-real time.

Using Cloud Cruiser, we can examine and aggregate financial data across multiple global Microsoft Azure subscriptions, which is crucial. Our Azure environment contains many subscriptions—Cloud Cruiser gives us the immediate visibility that’s required to manage and control costs.

Microsoft Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that helps us follow best practices to optimize our Microsoft Azure deployments. It analyzes our resource configuration and usage telemetry. It then recommends solutions to help improve the performance, security, and high availability of our resources while looking for opportunities to reduce our overall Azure costs.

Optimizing Microsoft Azure

With much of our cloud infrastructure in place, we recognized the need to optimize our Microsoft Azure resources. We created Microsoft Azure Resource Optimization (ARO), a combination of tools, processes, and education to help Microsoft teams examine both their total cost of cloud resources and the number of underutilized assets. The types of underutilized resources are evaluated to identify cost savings opportunities, such as IaaS virtual machines, Azure SQL databases, PaaS web and worker roles, Azure storage, virtual networks, and IPs.

Some examples of ARO recommendations include adjusting SKU sizes, deleting unused resources, or turning off resources during downtime. The overall ARO goal is to increase awareness of consumption, optimization, and cost of Microsoft Azure resources across Microsoft, to encourage engineers, managers, and leadership to adopt cost-effective behaviors. We deliver business intelligence to help people make key decisions about Azure usage, which will promote a culture of cloud optimization.

Modern teams

To implement our cloud-first transformation effectively and quickly, we formed engagement and program management teams to connect with our internal business partners, identify their needs, prioritize features, and deliver them with focused discipline. Individuals who can code Microsoft Azure infrastructure solutions as APIs, PowerShell scripts, and templates were united as software engineering teams. And we grouped all the manageability services under service engineering teams to provide reliable, available, and supportable services.

All other IT operations support teams were decentralized and integrated into application teams using the Microsoft Azure DevOps model to improve issue resolution time. Employees learned new skills, and we hired new people with needed skills. Assessing, refining, and hiring the right talent is part of organization hygiene.

Business outcomes

Accelerating our transformation to Microsoft Azure by changing roles, investing in new skills, and simplifying operations processes had four important benefits.

More productive workforce

• IT ecosystem is 98 percent in Microsoft Azure (IaaS mostly).
• We shifted to a self-service culture.
• Microsoft Azure DevOps is in practice.

More agile business

• Provisioning speed was increased 40-fold by simplifying operations processes and using native cloud solutions.

Reduced costs

• Customized IT tools were reduced 60 percent.
• CPU utilization increased 400 percent.
• Annual cloud spending was reduced 38 percent.
• On-premises IT datacenters and labs have been decommissioned across our production ecosystem.

Improved business partner experience

• We have improved the user experience and engagement with our business partners. We have shared practices and lessons learned across our company and industry.

Lessons learned in Phase 2

To make our digital transformation to Azure a success, we had to:

• Redesign strategic assets as Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions.
• Integrate engineering and manageability platforms.
• Use data as a strategic asset.
• Use predictive analytics and machine learning to prevent and remediate failures.

Phase 3: Embracing the digital ecosystem

Our ability to take advantage of emerging technologies and to embrace new business strategies will be a deciding factor in the modern era. Going forward, our MDEE teams are organized around end-to-end ownership of services that delight our business partners and that focus on innovation, co-creation, and collaboration.

Our first phase of transformation focused on migrating infrastructure and automating processes to drive efficiency and lower operations costs. The second phase was driven by adopting the Microsoft Azure platform, simplifying operations processes, and changing operations roles to invest in engineering, customer service, and native cloud solutions.

The next stage includes developing intelligent systems on Microsoft Azure to deliver reliable, scalable services and to connect operations processes across Microsoft. Bots will support basic user queries, while service reliability engineers strive to predict and remediate failures using predictive analytics and machine learning. Our focus is on operational resilience and cost avoidance. Several industry trends drive the continued evolution of our digital IT ecosystem:

• DevOps culture accelerates engineering team deliverables and decisions using a boundary-free flow of information and frictionless processes.
• Native cloud solutions offer an enterprise-level manageability platform that supports decentralized services and enables flexible, predictable, reliable response to changes with speed.
• Data has become a durable asset. With the proliferation of cloud infrastructure, mobile applications, and IOT devices there are growing needs to store massive data and analyze it in near-real time to predict patterns, build models, and drive intelligent actions among end-user communities
• Open source standards are increasingly supporting a platform for innovation, moving to the cloud, and enabling community governance at scale to balance the need for security with agility
• MDEE as a services broker shifts our engineering focus from system design/build to assembly, configuration, and integration of specialized third-party software components. We can accelerate the time to value and reduce technical debt.

The graphic below shows how our digital transformation and move to the cloud will use automation, enhanced resiliency, predictive analytics, and bots to integrate business partner feedback and improve service to our business partners.

We recognized that our business partners need hybrid cloud scale and economics by offering enterprise-level engineering and management platforms. We have embraced the industry trends of mobility, IOT, machine learning, AI, open source, and cross-platform standards.

Together, Microsoft Azure PaaS, Visual Studio Online, and AppInsights will enable engineers to focus on features and usability, while ARM fabric and OMS will provide a single pane of glass view to provision, manage, and decommission infrastructure resources securely. Only through optimizing the engineering and manageability process independently and in concert with each other can we achieve the digital transformation goals for Microsoft.

Our MDEE team plays an influential role in the digital transformation of the company. Our evolution and move to Microsoft Azure is anchored around the idea of building connected intelligence systems to transform how we engage with business partners, empower engineers, optimize operations, and reinvent products. Delivering excellence will drive the cultural change to modern practices.

With connected systems, simplified self-service provisioning, and a focus on our business partners, we can scale our infrastructure service offerings across the company and drive innovation, business agility, and productivity. In the process, we will also reduce costs and improve our operations resilience.

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The post Powering Microsoft’s operations transformation with Microsoft Azure appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

While the 50,000 employees who live in Redmond, Washington were blocked in by roughly two feet of snow that fell from February 4th-12th, the Microsoft Teams platform they used to work from home didn’t flinch despite taking on a much heavier workload than usual. The storms that battered the Northwest were the first large-scale test for remote workers at Microsoft since the company began moving all its communications from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams in the fall.

“The big win here is Teams stayed consistent—we didn’t see a big difference from before the storms even though 90 percent of our employees were working from home,” says Dan Babb, a senior service engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “Our metrics stayed pretty much the same across all the different kinds of internet connections that our employees use at home—that’s pretty amazing compared to where we used to be.”

The technology mostly disappeared into the background – it just worked.

“The environment scaled up,” Babb says. “All of the employees who were working from home used their own home network connections, which are never going to be as good as the connection we have in our corporate buildings. The metrics we focus on did have a slight dip—which was to be expected—but still remained green.”

To geek out for a minute, Teams performed even better than you would think, says Jonathan Clare, also a senior service engineer in Microsoft Digital.

“Most people working at home are on WiFi,” he says, explaining that the bulk of the 50,000 employees who live in the Puget Sound region were working from home, seriously taxing the private internet services they were using to connect. “Despite that, Teams performed very similar to how it would if everyone was working in their offices—that we had that kind of parity is remarkable.”

Babb attributes the positive experience to the massively scalable Teams’ micro-service architecture that runs natively in the cloud.

Teams isn’t without challenges, but those are mainly around refining the user experience.

“When I talk, I can be clearly understood,” Babb says. “The chance of having any type of audio distortion has greatly reduced—for example, I don’t sound like I have robot voice, and my voice doesn’t sound like it’s being cutoff.”  Teams optimizes the audio and video experience in limited bandwidth conditions, greatly improving the call quality experience.

The biggest test for Teams during the snowstorms was meetings, because the impact of having everyone call in at the same time during a weather event is exponential.

“When everyone is in the office, you can have 10 people attend a meeting in a conference room—you can aggregate everyone in the room down to one person joining a meeting,” Babb says. “When everyone calls in from home, the level of complexity and the scale of the load is exponentially higher because all 10 of those people have to join on their own.”

During the storm, Teams worked fine, despite everyone at the company joining all their meetings from home, all at the same time. “The service didn’t bat an eye,” Babb says.

Some employees anecdotally reported having a few calls drop during the weather event, but there’s no way around that when everyone in the region is dealing with the same storm system that caused intermittent power outages and congested public internet services, Clare says.

Clare and Babb say they’re happy with how well Teams held up in its first big test at Microsoft.

The post Microsoft Teams keeps employees connected during epic snow event   appeared first on Inside Track Blog.