Emeric and launch leadership had to do exactly that when they set out to transform the way Microsoft launches products, something that would require acceptance from product groups that build drastically different products and services.

“Initially, there was resistance to change because people were familiar with the processes in their own silos,” Emeric says. “We encouraged employees to have a growth mindset and recognize the value for the entire company.”

Teams across Microsoft used 600 different launch types, each with their own vision, roadmap, and revenue forecast. Emeric and Brandon Ruby, a director of operations in MBO responsible for launch process, infrastructure, and analytics, knew that transforming the launch process would require a change in the people, process, and technology. But the most crucial part was adding value to the work of launch managers.

“We saw a gap in experience and productivity, and we wanted to make sure that the launch managers felt like they were a part of the process,” Ruby says.

This transformation aligned with MBO’s vision to run state-of-the-art operations.

“Our culture of innovation in Operations empowers employees to lead improvement for our customers and partners through end-to-end business process improvement and tool optimization,” says Mary Ellen Smith, the corporate vice president of MBO. “Modernizing our launch processes enables us to compliantly launch products, services, and capabilities with agility at scale.”

[Learn how Microsoft is optimizing launch management to deliver innovation to market with speed and compliance. Check out how citizen developers at Microsoft used Microsoft Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.]

The previously siloed launch process didn’t align with Microsoft’s integrated selling model that bundles products, devices, and cloud services.

“We knew putting together end-to-end solutions would be challenging if we didn’t change the way we sell,” Emeric says. “Bundled solutions are especially important for commercial and industrial scenarios where you have a range of devices, cloud services, and AI on top of what you’re trying to build.”

Additionally, compliance was also done manually in silos using spreadsheets, Microsoft PowerPoint decks, and Microsoft Word documents. Each launch manager would be responsible for knowing the latest launch rules or working with experts who could flag finance and anti-corruption risks.

This led Microsoft to create a single launch delivery process that runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform to deliver innovation with speed and compliance.  This ensures that over 200 launch managers at Microsoft have a consistent way to conduct compliance assessments of their product, service, and program launches at scale.

“Before, there was a perception that our launch process was slowing people down,” Emeric says. “In reality, offering a standardized launch process enables Microsoft to do highly complex launches and assess risks with minimal risk to the company.”

The new launch process requires a dynamic digital compliance assessment, which asks a list of questions that change as risk domain owners continuously evaluate risk categories. This is critical to consistently assess risk across the launch ecosystem. The launch team’s responses are used to determine the risk of the launch, and launch managers consult relevant risk domain owners on key risks involving finance, trade, and anti-corruption. Launch managers are then responsible for mitigating or closing risks before launching their product or service.

“Through a centralized risk management process and consultation with risk domain owners, we are much more confident that 100 percent of critical launches are managed, maintained, and meet compliance requirements before they go out the door,” Ruby says.

Built by the launch community, for the launch community

Initially, Ruby’s team focused on the process, data fields, and controls of the transformed launch process. Halfway through their journey, it was evident that the team was putting the process and digital requirements ahead of experience and productivity. Launch managers needed to be more involved in shaping the launch process that was a part of their day-to-day work.

“We found that communities, citizen development, and incubation are a great combination for creating experiences that empower the productivity of launch managers,” Ruby says.

In the summer of 2019, a team of people from MBO and Microsoft Digital participated in the Microsoft Hackathon with the goal of transforming the company’s launch process.

“This led to the creation of a citizen development program where we create rapid prototypes of value with the community,” Ruby says. “We continue to have conversations where we identify top priorities before making major investments on the platform.”

Ruby is referring to the Launch Management Excellence team, a forum among launch managers and citizen developers across the company who bring perspective from their launch portfolios. They share pain points that they’ve heard from their teammates, advise on best practices for the launch process, and provide information about upcoming trainings and events. Based on these conversations, Emeric and Ruby can return to their leadership team and share what the launch community is passionate about addressing.

“Our launch managers drive the conversation,” Emeric says. “We prioritize the needs we get in this feedback loop and address the top pain points first.”

Leading with a vision and intentional investment in your employees

Transforming the launch process with compliance by design is already paying off. It’s been exciting for Emeric to see the vision come to life.

“When it comes to transforming your launch process, it’s vital to have a clear vision about what you want your transformation to look like and have buy-in from leadership,” she says.

As this vision has come to fruition, Emeric has found that teams see MBO as a leader in launch.

“Business groups come to us for launch resources or oversight so they can ensure that they’re compliant,” Emeric says. “They’re also using our launch platform for portfolio, launch, and external risk management.”

Transforming the launch process requires intentional investment in the experience and productivity of employees. At Microsoft, the launch community and citizen development community have been central in deciding what features to add to the new process.

“You have to invest in people just as much as the process and technology,” Emeric says. “Our leadership team understood that they could have the biggest impact by empowering people with the tools they need to be productive.”

Ruby and Emeric also emphasized the importance of prioritizing progress over perfection. The team is always iterating on the launch process, and they’re willing to repivot if necessary.

“It’s a journey, and you have to start somewhere,” Ruby says. “If you anchor it in making an investment and having a shared vision, you’ll see progress.”

Emeric and Ruby recognize that the launch platform and community have grown significantly since this journey began two and a half years ago, and they hope to empower customers and partners to transform their launch processes too.

“The goal for Microsoft is to be the industry leader in how enterprises launch products and services,” Emeric says. “Our launch process is designed to uphold our commitment to trust and compliance, all while ensuring that our customers and partners have a great experience.”

• Learn how Microsoft is optimizing launch management to deliver innovation to market with speed and compliance.
• Check out how citizen developers at Microsoft used Microsoft Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.

The post Rethinking how Microsoft launches its products and services appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Now that it has finished “lifting and shifting” its massive internal workload to Microsoft Azure, the company is rethinking everything.

“We’re rearchitecting all of our applications so that they work natively on Azure,” says Ludovic Hauduc, corporate vice president of Core Platform Engineering in Microsoft Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO). “We’re retooling to take advantage of all that the cloud has to offer.”

Microsoft spent the last five years moving the internal workload of its 60,000 on-premises servers to Azure. Thanks to early efforts to modernize some of that workload while migrating it, and to ruthlessly removing everything that wasn’t being used, the company is now running about 6,500 virtual machines in Azure. This number dynamically scales up to around 11,000 virtual machines when the company is processing extra work at the end of months, quarters, and years. It still has about 1,500 virtual machines on premises, most of which are there intentionally. The company is now 97 percent in the cloud.

Now that the company’s cloud migration is done and dusted, it’s Hauduc’s job to craft a framework for transforming Microsoft into a born-in-the-cloud company. CSEO will then use that framework to retool all the applications and services that the organization uses to provide IT and operations services to the larger company.

The job is bigger than building a guide for how the company will rebuild applications that support Human Resources, Finance, and so on. Hauduc’s team is creating a roadmap for how Microsoft will rearchitect those applications in a consistent, connected way that focuses on the end user experience while also figuring out how to get the more than 3,000 engineers in CSEO who will rebuild those applications to embrace the modern engineering–fueled cultural shift needed for this transformation to happen.

[Take a deep dive into how Hauduc and his team in CSEO are using a cloud-centric mindset to drive the company’s transformation. Find out more about how CSEO is using a modern-engineering mindset to engineer solutions inside Microsoft.]

Move to the cloud creates transformation opportunity

Despite good work by good people, CSEO’s engineering model wasn’t ready to scale to the demands of Microsoft’s growth and how fast its internal businesses were evolving. Moving to the cloud created the perfect opportunity to fix it.

“In the past, every project we worked on was delivered pretty much in isolation,” Hauduc says. “We operated very much as a transaction team that worked directly for internal customers like Finance and HR.”

CSEO engineering was done externally through vendors who were not connected or incentivized to talk to each other. They would take their orders from the business group they were supporting, build what was asked for, get paid, and move on to the next project.

“We would spin up a new vendor team and just get the project done—even if it was a duplication or a slight iteration on top of another project that already had been delivered,” he says. “That’s how we ended up with a couple of invoicing systems, a few financial reporting systems, and so on and so forth.”

Lack of a larger strategy prevented CSEO from building applications that made sense for Microsoft employees.

This made for a rough user experience.

“Each application had a different look and feel,” Hauduc says. “Each one had its own underlying structure and data system. Nothing was connected and data was replicated multiple times, all of which would create challenges around privacy, security, data freshness, etc.”

The problem was simple—the team wasn’t working against a strategy that let it push back at the right moments.

“The word that the previous IT organization never really used was ‘no,’” Hauduc says. “They felt like they had no choice in the matter.”

When moving to the cloud opens the door to transformation

The story is different today. Now CSEO has its own funding and is choosing which projects to build based on a strategic vision that outlines where it wants to take the company.

“The conversation has completely shifted, not only because we have moved things to the cloud, but because we have taken a single, unified data strategy,” Hauduc says. “It has altered how we engage with our internal customers in ways that were not possible when everything was on premises and one-off.”

Now CSEO engineers are working in much smarter ways.

“We now have agility around operating our internal systems that we could never have fathomed achieving on prem,” he says. “Agility from the point of view of elasticity, from the point of view of releases, of understanding how our workloads are being used and deriving insights from these workloads, but also agility from the point of view of reacting and adapting to the changing needs of our internal business partners in an extremely rapid manner because we have un-frictioned access to the data, to the signals, and to the metrics that tell us whether we are meeting the needs of our internal customers.”

And those business groups who unknowingly came and asked for something CSEO had already built?

“We now have an end-to-end view of all the work we’re doing across the company,” Hauduc says. “We can correlate, we can match the patterns of issues and problems that our other internal customers have had, we can show them what could happen if they don’t change their approach, and best of all, we can give them tips for improving in ways they never considered.”

CSEO’s approach may have been flawed in the past, but there were lots of good reasons for that, Hauduc says. He won’t minimize the work that CSEO engineers did to get Microsoft to the threshold of digitally transforming and moving to the cloud.

“The skills and all of the things that made us successful as an IT organization before we started on a cloud journey are great,” he says. “They’re what contributed to building the company and operating the company the way we have today.”

But now it’s time for new approaches and new thinking.

“The skills that are required to run our internal systems and services today in the cloud, those are completely different,” he says.

As a result, the way the team operates, the way it interacts, and the way it engages with its internal customers have had to evolve.

“The cultural journey that CSEO has been on is happening in parallel with our technical transformation,” Hauduc continues. “The technical transformation and the cultural transformation could not have happened in isolation. They had to happen in concert, and to a large extent, they fueled each other as we arrived at what we can now articulate as our cloud-centric architecture.”

And about that word that people in CSEO were afraid to say? They’re saying it now.

“The word ‘no’ is now a very powerful word,” Hauduc says. “When a customer request comes in, the answer is ‘yes, we’ll prioritize it,’ or ‘no, this isn’t the most important thing we can build for the company from a ROI standpoint, but here’s what we can do instead.’”

The change has been empowering to all of CSEO.

“The quality and the shape of the conversation has changed,” he says. “Now we in CSEO are uniquely positioned to take a step back and say, ‘for the company, the most important thing for us to prioritize is this, let’s go deliver on it.’”

Take a deep dive into how Hauduc and his team in CSEO are using a cloud-centric mindset to drive the company’s transformation.

Find out more about how CSEO is using a modern-engineering mindset to engineer solutions inside Microsoft.

The post How ‘born in the cloud’ thinking is fueling Microsoft’s transformation appeared first on Inside Track Blog.