{"id":10532,"date":"2023-05-04T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2023-05-04T16:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10532"},"modified":"2023-06-30T13:11:25","modified_gmt":"2023-06-30T20:11:25","slug":"enabling-launch-optimization-at-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/enabling-launch-optimization-at-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"Enabling launch optimization at Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"
[Editor\u2019s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we\u2019re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.]<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/a><\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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\u2014such as products, services, capabilities, and business models\u2014that 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\u2014all 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.<\/p>\n The Microsoft Business Operations organization is the steward of the rules for how Microsoft does business. They\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Our investment in digital portfolio management is creating benefits across Microsoft, including:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t have a standardized template or method to govern launch processes. This leads to isolated launch processes that require significant manual intervention.<\/p>\n Our investment in launch automation is creating benefits across Microsoft, including:<\/p>\n 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\u2014from creation to end-of-support\u2014follows all compliance controls and deploys at the optimum speed for Microsoft and its customers and partners. We\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Our investment in product, offer, and price management is already creating benefits across Microsoft, including:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Our investment in readiness at scale is creating benefits across Microsoft, including:<\/p>\n 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\u2019re 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:<\/p>\n The intelligent insights investment addresses several challenges. Compliance rules are continually changing and growing. Compliance adherence needs to be agile, but it\u2019s currently managed through manual processes. Specific knowledge and functional expertise are required to identify risks, issues, and dependencies accurately, but they\u2019re difficult to obtain, so it\u2019s not easy for launch team members to identify next actionable steps. We need more robust monitoring and effective management for launch policies.<\/p>\n Our investment in intelligent insights is creating benefits across Microsoft, including:<\/p>\n We\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On our journey toward launch optimization, we\u2019ve identified foundational principles to enable effective transformation:<\/p>\n At Microsoft, we\u2019ve radically changed how we develop and release products to market by applying a continually updated services model. We\u2019re transforming our internal processes, policies, and platform delivery expectations to meet continually evolving customer expectations and the changing rules for doing business. We\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [Editor\u2019s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we\u2019re 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":10538,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_hide_featured_on_single":false,"_show_featured_caption_on_single":true,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[423,89],"coauthors":[646],"class_list":["post-10532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-developer-tools","tag-digital-transformation","program-microsoft-digital-technical-stories","m-blog-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nUnderstanding the changing launch landscape<\/h2>\n
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Optimizing launch management with investments<\/h2>\n
Digital portfolio management<\/h3>\n
Challenges<\/h4>\n
Benefits<\/h4>\n
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Launch automation<\/h3>\n
Challenges<\/h4>\n
Benefits<\/h4>\n
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Product, offer and price management<\/h3>\n
Challenges<\/h4>\n
Benefits<\/h4>\n
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Readiness at scale<\/h3>\n
Challenges<\/h4>\n
Benefits<\/h4>\n
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Intelligent Insights<\/h3>\n
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Challenges<\/h4>\n
Benefits<\/h4>\n
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Enabling and measuring launch excellence at Microsoft<\/h2>\n
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Conclusion<\/h2>\n
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