The Challenge
Since its creation in 2007, Microsoft Field IT leveraged its innovative and entrepreneurial style to land strategic IT programs in the 100+ countries where Microsoft does business. The organization evolved from local units to a regionalized “follow the sun” structure and ultimately to a Shared Services Model that capitalized on its global expertise and resources. As they accomplished this transformation—serving as a model for the company’s broader IT organization—they leaned on BECAUZ for both strategic consulting and tactical execution in the areas of business strategy, organizational change management, leadership development, and event management.
Early in 2012, Field IT leadership came to BECAUZ with a new challenge. Field IT had merged with two other Microsoft IT organizations to create a new, end-to-end, User Experience IT (UEIT) organization. Walter Puschner, Vice President, now led a team of nearly 900 members, up from 345. But the biggest changes and impacts were not as much organizational as cultural. For years Field IT’s focus had been on the “field” – Microsoft employees outside of the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. With this new, larger organization the gravitational pull was now shifting toward headquarters and the oversight of foundational services, such as infrastructure, networking, and data centers.
Doug Barrancotto, UEIT’s Chief of Staff, asked BECAUZ to help rapidly merge the three organizations into one cohesive organization, aligned around a common vision and strategy.
Our Approach
To address this tectonic shift in culture and organizational purpose, BECAUZ understood that it needed a multi-faceted approach that would take into account the cultural norms and organizational maturity of each team. No silver bullet here!
The BECAUZ team proposed a series of three, large-scale, transformational conferences, held in three global hubs: Seattle USA, London UK, and Hyderabad India. These conferences would be followed by a number of smaller, facilitated events and working groups and a rich fabric of ongoing communication and support for the leadership team as they grew into their new roles.
Jumping into Action
With only three weeks of lead time before the first event, BECAUZ worked with UEIT’s leadership to frame vision and strategy, and then developed themes, agendas, and processes for the four day conferences that would average 400 attendees each. At the same time, the BECAUZ team was pulling together budgets and arranging venues, travel, event logistics plus developing a communication and marketing plan with materials, onsite signage and banners.
To ensure each conference hewed tightly to the vision and theme, BECAUZ assembled three distinct facilitation and production teams to deliver the conferences. These teams then prepped UEIT’s new leaders to play their central role in delivering the content to the organization.
The conferences were designed to introduce the members of the new UEIT organization to their leaders’ vision for the organization and then, through collaborative sessions, engage them in building the behaviors and strategy for executing on that vision. An essential element of the conference design was to provide generous amounts of time for collaborating together in small groups and building individual relationships and networks, as team members were meeting each other and their new leadership team for the first time.
The Results
The conference strategy designed by the BECAUZ team called for specific results that were a consistent focus of attention over the course of the multi-month program. Each conference was a distinct experience—fashioned to be successful in widely different cultural contexts—but all driving toward the same outcomes:
Aligning team members with the vision for the new organization
- Prior to the events, BECAUZ worked with UEIT leadership to determine the message themes for the new organization. The result was a “Focus” campaign: Focus on Quality, Focus on the End User, Focus on Speed, Focus on Continuous Improvement (Kaizen), Focus on Results, Focus on Prioritization. These themes infused the design for each event (and will be continued throughout the coming year), provided clarity on the organization’s strategy, and set the whole of UEIT in motion.
Creating a single, cohesive community out of distinct teams
- The BECAUZ team led large-scale, transformational processes that created an atmosphere of collaboration and fun while at the same time helping the team identify best-practices for how they would work and communicate together. The four-day experience was very people-centric and honored the new leadership team and each attendee.
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Preparing the organization for action
- BECAUZ used the Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement (called Kaizen) and Open Space processes to help the team identify what they needed to accomplish together in order to achieve the organization’s vision. At each event, attendees captured hundreds of ideas and then worked together to narrow down the lists to a few key areas of focus that could be used to create plans for action. This process pooled the intelligence and insight of the entire organization in order to create a robust, well articulated strategy for generating results.
Creating lasting value
- From the earliest planning stages, BECAUZ knew that to help UEIT complete its transformation the effort would need to continue beyond these three kick-off events. As part of the strategic planning conducted at the events, the groups were challenged to build a sustainable effort to execute on strategy. This effort included continuing the Kaizen process and engaging in BECAUZ-facilitated working groups on a 90-day cycle to ensure that the ideas and energy generated by the conferences were leveraged on a go-forward basis.
The results? A clear vision and a strategy for achieving it that are broadly supported by employees. An energized and cohesive team where there once were three disparate groups. A commitment to continue to improve, collaborate, stretch and achieve together that lasts to this day.