1. Microsoft Solutions Framework

2. It is a Framework
• Goal
– adaptable framework
– successfully delivering information technology solutions
– faster,
– requiring fewer people, and
– involving less risk,
– While enabling higher quality results.
• Not Prescriptive
– Flexible scalable approach that can be adapted to suit context

3. Current Project Challenges
• Disconnected stakeholders WITH
– irregular, random, or insufficient business input into the process,
resulting in critical needs going uncaptured.
• Teams that don’t understand the business problem
– don’t have clearly defined roles, and
– struggle to communicate internally and externally.
• Requirements capture failure
– Fail to address the real customer problems,
– cannot be implemented as stated
– omit important features, &
– include unsubstantiated features.

4. Current Project Challenges
• A vague project approach
– Not well understood by the participants,
– resulting in confusion, overwork, missing elements, and reduced
solution quality.
• Poor hand-off from project teams to operations
– Lengthy delays in realizing business value
– Costly workarounds to meet business demands.

5. MSF – Process Model..

6. MSF – Foundation Principles
1. Foster open communications
2. Work toward a shared vision
3. Empower team members
4. Establish clear accountability and shared responsibility
5. Focus on delivering business value
6. Stay agile, expect change
7. Invest in quality
8. Learn from all experiences
Business
Goals
Invest in Be Agile /CHANGE
Quality
Single Vision
Resp & Open Communication
Accountability
Empowered Learn from Experience
Team

7. Focus on Business Value
• ―Experience had taught Thomas Edison to combine commercial and technical
considerations. The ‗electric vote recorder,‘ the first invention for which Edison
received a patent, tallied votes quickly and was intended for use within legislatures.
But when he approached a congressional committee about sales, the committee
chairman told him, ‗Young man, that is just what we do not want.‖ (It would infringe on
the sacred institution of the filibuster.) His machine was never produced, and he
resolved not to devote his attention to the invention of anything that lacked
‗commercial demand.‘‖ - Randall E. Stross
• Business value is a reflection of the value that end
customers are ready to bet on the service rendered. To
identify the JTBD and the outcome expectation therefore
is key
Model / Key Proven
Discipline Concept Practice Recommendation
1. Customer Experience 1. Understand customer 1. Capture JTBD and 1. JTBD & Outcome
2. Business Value & latent needs and jobs to Outcome Expectations Expectations
Strategy be done. 2. Objective ROI based 2. Systems Thinking
3. Design Thinking 2. Business Case definition portfolio 3. Instrument, Analyze,
3. Continuously map 3. Measurement based Gamify
customer experience design in services 4. SOA – portfolio mgmt

8. Invest in Quality
• Demings concept of zero inspection and the lean concept of
systemically solving failures in execution are critical to achieving
high level of Quality
• In addition the current insight of understanding and preempting
customer needs and managing their experience would be critical in
developing services that are appreciated and adopted by end users
• Quality is value. The key is to understand quality in the
upstream.. Demand Failure identification is critical to
eliminate value-less work that get generated in
operations..
Model / Key Proven
Discipline Concept Practice Recommendation
1. Customer Experience 1. Anthropologists in design 1. Poke-Yoke Design 1. Value stream mapping
2. Failure Demand 2. Design thinking 2. Systems thinking 2. System operator models
3. Zero Inspection 3. Poke – yoke in process 3. Incremental Agile
4. Learning from failures 4. Stop on Failures innovation
5. Stable Tech.

9. Common Shared Vision
• ―Before the project gets rolling, a team needs to buy in to a common vision.
• Without such a shared vision, high-performance teamwork cannot take
place.A study of 75 teams found that in every case in which the team
functioned effectively, the team had a clear understanding of its
objective."—Steve McConnell2
• Vision is key to delivery and assessment of success
• clarify goals and bring conflicts and mistaken assumptions to light so
they can be resolved.
• Clarifying and getting commitment to a shared vision is so important
that it is the primary objective of the first phase of any MSF project.
Model / Key Proven
Discipline Concept Practice Recommendation
1. Scope & Integration 1. Top Management & 1. Good Leadership Quality 1. 6 Hat Model
2. Team & Workgroup Team Buy-in 2. Systems Thinking 2. Mckinsey – Brick in the
management wall
3. Strategy maps

10. Empower Team Members
• ―On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership,
taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the
permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and
the team interaction would begin to break down. The structure of a team is a
network, not a hierarchy.― —Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister4
• Empowered teams accept responsibility for the
management of project risks and team readiness and
therefore proactively manage such risk and readiness to
ensure the greatest probability of success
Model / Key Proven
Discipline Concept Practice Recommendation
1. Execution 1. Roles and 1. Identify individual 1. HR measurement of
2. Organization design Responsibilities capabilities people capabilities
3. Structures 2. Latitude for Failures 2. Regular mentoring and 2. Systems to support
3. Performance / feedback individual actions
measurement

11. Learn from All Experiences
• 99% of all innovation is applied innovation – which means that the
innovation insight was already there and re-applied to a specific use case or
industry – Genrich Altshuller
• Psychological inertia, defined as a limits that a person
thinks through based on experience, training and
environment, needs to be overcome to achieve new
innovative insights and designs that a breakthrough and
disruptive.
Model / Key Proven
Discipline Concept Practice Recommendation
1. Learning based 1. Psychological inertia 1. Triz based innovation 1. ARIZ – Triz
Execution 2. Recording Experiences 2. Google organization 2. Google – Experiment,
2. Innovative teams 3. Sharing within teams Approaches Measure, Scale, Share,
3. Cross learning session
4. Lateral thinking debono
5. 20% own time. Discover

12. Stay Agile, Expect change
• ―On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership,
taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the
permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and
the team interaction would begin to break down. The structure of a team is a
network, not a hierarchy.― —Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister4
• Focus on the Agile Manifesto
– Working Outcome based delivery
– Face to Face Communication
– Collaboration with Customer / Business
– Responding to Change
Model / Key Proven
Discipline Concept Practice Recommendation
1. Flexibility in delivery and 1. Agile Principles 1. Outcome focused 1. Storyboards, fixed time
the ability to adopt to 2. Extreme programming delivery models execution – Iterate
change organization 2. Time and iteration based 2. Daily Team stand-ups
2. Iterative, Time oriented plans 3. Small coherent work-
execution 3. Visual thinking groups
communication

13. Accountability & Responsibility
• ―Each [team] member‘s relationship to the team must be defined in terms of
the role to be assumed and the results the role is to produce. Eventually,
any team effort boils down to the assumption of individual responsibilities
and accountabilities.‖
• They are interdependent for two reasons:
– first, out of necessity, since it is impossible to isolate each role’s
work;
– second, by preference, since the team will be more effective if
each role is aware of the entire picture
Model / Key Proven
Discipline Concept Practice Recommendation
1. Organization design 1. R&R in the organization 1. Common vocabulary of 1. Systems for aligning
2. Trickle key outcome outcomes GNO to organization
objectives through 2. Few and manageable 2. Internal social networks
structure objectives – trickle down to converse and mentor

14. Foster Open Communication
• ―Schedule disaster, functional misfits, and system bugs all arise because
the left hand doesn‘t know what the right hand is doing…. How, then, shall
teams communicate with one another? In as many ways as possible. -
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr1
• information has to be readily available and actively
shared for optimal functioning
Model / Key Proven
Discipline Concept Practice Recommendation
1. Communicate 1. Listen & Share 1. Pre-Emptive Sharing 1. Create Voice & data
2. Messages 2. Pull based Comm. Stores
2. Incentives & encourage
share

15. MSF Team Model

16. Team Roles – Quality goals
• Every one knows the
roles and their owners
•

17. Process Model - Spiral
• The phases can be
viewed as
– exploratory,
investigatory, creative,
single-minded, &
disciplined.

18. Main Disciplines in MSF
• Project Management
– Emphasis is on consensus based
decisions
• Risk Management
– Emphasis on every stage of the
project
• Readiness Management
– successful adoption and realization
of a technology investment.
– Current versus desired state of KSA
– During planning, building &
managing solutions.

19. Learning MSF
• MSF Resource Library.
– http://www.microsoft.com/msf
• The recommended order for reading the white papers is
as follows:
– Microsoft Solutions Framework version 3.0 Overview (this paper)
– The MSF Team Model
– The MSF Process Model
– The MSF Project Management Discipline
– The MSF Risk Management Discipline
– The MSF Readiness Management Discipline