Microsoft has increasingly put focus on value realization over the past few years.  Our team has been at the forefront of this journey and we’d like to share what we’ve learned with the broader community of practitioners to help bridge the gap between the state of the art and the state of the practice, as well as move the ball forward.

Our Value Realization Framework (VRF) team is part of Microsoft’s Enterprise Strategy Program  The VRF team creates methodology, tools, and prescriptive guidance to help our Field practitioners to plan for and execute business value realization and business value acceleration. (More on this below.)

For clarity, in our context “Value Realization” is value extracted from a business-focused technology initiative.  (And a key concept here is that value is in the eye of the stakeholder.)

What to Expect

The purpose of this blog is to give you a behind-the-scene look at how we support our Enterprise (large) customers in achieving Value Realization and to share stories from our Field practitioners around driving business outcomes through business capability transformation underpinned by technology.

You can think of this as opening up the doors and windows to our workshop, where we’ll share the raw, the real, and sometimes the radical, as we continue to learn and improve our Value Realization techniques.  It’s an ongoing journey of learning and improvement.

Here are some of the types of things we’ll share on the blog:

• Delivery Documentaries.    These are a behind-the-scene look at how we partner with customers to ensure Value Realization.  This is about what goes on in the trenches, on real engagements and is not intended to be pretty; it’s a process of continuous improvement.
• Techniques and How Tos.  We’ll share the practices and techniques that practitioners are using to support Value Realization.
• Trends and Insights.   We’ll share what we’re seeing in our engagements with Enterprise customers, and any key insights that might help out the broader community of practitioners.
• Stories from the Field.    These will be centered on stories of transformation, where Value Realization has been front and center, and which suggest broader learnings / patterns.
• Value Realization Framework learnings.   Our Value Realization Framework has been in development for several years.  We’ve learned a lot along the way.  We’ll share our insights.

Enterprise Strategy Program (ESP)

First, for a little bit of context -- The mission of Enterprise Strategy is to help customers maximize value of their investments in our technologies.    When customers sign up for the program, they get a Microsoft senior architect who helps them plan their strategy and execute programs of change. The architect leverages our methodologies, collective know-now, and unique access to Microsoft’s internal resources making sure that every customer gets the benefit of “100% of Microsoft.”

As you can imagine, there are a lot of Enterprise customers considering how to respond to and leverage Cloud, Mobile, Social, Big Data / Analytics.  They are also thinking about how to adapt their business to a digital economy and how to digitize their processes and products accordingly.  This is where an architect can help envision the future possibilities for the business and how an Enterprise can innovate and use technology for a competitive advantage.

But ultimately the value is in the change – we don’t stop at value identification or planning for value, we differentiate ourselves by emphasizing Value Realization. Our architects support customers through the entire lifecycle of initiative definition & prioritization, solution implementation, adoption until the anticipated business value is realized.

“Business Before Technology”

Our architects take a “business before technology” approach.  They are chosen for their industry expertise (banking, healthcare, retail, etc.) and experience of linking business priorities to enabling technological solutions. They understand market drivers and business imperatives, and can rapidly help customers to build consensus around investment objectives, business benefits, required business change, and possible technological solutions to support the change.

Importantly, our architects never focus solely on technology. Even when the initiative moves into the solution implementation phase, we look at it as a holistic program of change with technological, people and process components, since for the business benefit to materialize all these dimensions need to be addressed. Of course the architect utilizes other, more technology-focused resources within Microsoft, but she herself remains the champion of business value realization with focus on business capabilities and business outcomes.

Microsoft Value Realization Framework

To help customers make the most of their investments in Microsoft products and technologies we need a “method.”  That’s where the Microsoft Value Realization Framework comes into play.

In the simplest terms, it’s a value-driven, repeatable approach for our architects to identify, prioritize, and execute programs and projects that will help the customer realize and accelerate more business value.  As mentioned earlier, we go beyond technology and consider other aspects of change (e.g. governance, adoption) to help reduce, as Gartner would put it, “value leakage.”

Specifically, the Microsoft Value Realization Framework helps Enterprise customers:

1. Focus technology investments on business goals & imperatives
2. Envision and define a program of change and secure resources for execution
3. Execute the program in the most effective and value-maximizing way
4. Track the realized value back to business goals & KPIs and drive business outcomes

The Microsoft Value Realization Framework helps customer executives address the following questions:

1. What should we do?  Answering this involves identifying potential technology-enabled opportunities in terms of overall business impact, as well as ability to execute, based on business and IT capabilities and maturity. 
2. How do we do it?  This involves driving key stakeholder engagement, influencing requirements, and providing alternatives and recommendations resulting in agreement to fund.
3. Did we deliver value for the investment?  This involves ensuring the implementation follows proven patterns and practices, adoption occurs, and value is realized and acknowledged.

An important aspect of the Microsoft Value Realization Framework is that it’s a multifaceted, multidiscipline view that connects technology to business outcomes and business transformation.   The Microsoft Value Realization Framework effectively balances and blends a technological perspective with change management perspective and, most importantly, ever-present focus on business value.

We’ll be covering the Microsoft Value Realization Framework in more detail in future posts.

Value Realization Services

Value Realization Framework guides end-to-end advisory engagements that we undertake for, or rather, in partnership with our customers. In addition to that we have also uncovered a set of more granular services that could help our customers with specific aspects of their business-focused, but technology-driven initiatives.  Having a defined set helps us get specific about the inputs, the outputs, the flow of activities, and helps customers understand what to expect.

Here is a brief summary of each Value Realization service:

1. Adoption and Change Management:  With this service we plan for and support the execution of the program of change from an adoption and change management perspective.  We do scenario-driven adoption, and this is where deep experience in our technology can help with user readiness and adoption planning.
2. Architectural Options and Recommendations:  Here we evaluate the architecture (in its broadest sense) across multiple perspectives - tech, business, social, commercial, and validate the proposed technology architecture(s) against the business imperatives, business architecture, business outcomes, and expected business value. All to enable various stakeholders to have their concerns about the proposed solutions evaluated and addressed.  Key here is that architectural choices are based on tested and proven practices recommended by Microsoft , as well as our value-driven approach.
3. Business Case Development:  The objective is to produce a business case (rationale) that addresses the needs of all key stakeholders, so that they collectively can make the best business decision.  This means walking with stakeholders through benefits, costs, risks, and getting clear on KPIs that the business cares about.  This is where experience from the Field and technical depth can help create more realistic business case data.
4. Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC): Here we develop GRC plans (planning, not operating them) to facilitate effective decision making throughout the program lifecycle, and provide program oversight and status reporting to defined governance structures (steering committees and review boards) as appropriate.  A strength here is that we can provide GRC insight from the holistic program of change level all the way down to the level of detailed technological change management.
5. Portfolio Optimization: Through this service we help validate and prioritize initiatives and investments, and/or help the customer create and prioritize strategies.  This is where we get to marry a unique blend of technological and business expertise.
6. License Agreement Value Roadmap : Here we review the customer’s current investment in licenses, look at the value realized (from those licenses), and then help identify potential additional business value for the customer in terms of both the low-hanging fruit as well as long-term business value.
7. Value Discovery Service: This is a value-driven ideation and innovation exercise.  We explore potential for value creation and build a consensus view between IT and business stakeholders within the company, and help prioritize which IT initiatives would maximize customer's business benefits.
8. Value Management Service:  The focus of this service is to drive the tracking and acknowledgement of value realization from key stakeholders, by measuring/monitoring the business value as it is being realized.
9. Value Planning Service:  The key output of this service is a holistic (beyond technology), time-specific plan (milestone-driven) to ensure the delivery of expected business value and benefits. This is achieved through an analysis of expected benefits, drivers of value realization, and an agreed measurement system.

Our Practitioners

Most of what you’ll see in this blog will be coming from our practitioners, so we felt it would be helpful to introduce them. We represent a team of seasoned experts with business acumen and architect backgrounds who can drive our “Business Before Technology” approach

With their industry focus and expertise, our practitioners can provide unique insight on the trends that matter in a highly relevant way.   Instead of a generic discussion around Cloud, Mobile, Social, Big Data, they can talk to with great specificity how those are impacting the retail industry or the banking industry or healthcare, etc.   They can share stories of what others in the industry are doing, and how technology is helping achieve business outcomes and business capability transformation.

And of course, as part of knowing the business, our practitioners know the KPIs that count, the value drivers that influence them, the pitfalls that lead to “value leakage.”   This makes it a lot easier to connect technology back to the business in relevant ways, while accelerating business value and optimizing our customers’ investment in technology from both an economic value and from a strategic perspective.

What’s Next?

This is probably enough context.

In subsequent posts we will share more detail on how our approach and services are working in the real-world, what Enterprise customers are finding most useful, what key learnings our architects are sharing. As this blog is meant to be for the benefit of the broad practitioner community, we will welcome your comments, inputs, posts that could advance our mission of helping businesses realize maximum value from their technology investments.

Please add your comments here and send your suggestions/submissions to vrblog@microsoft.com.