OIL Proposal Prioritization
In my continuing series of posts describing the lessons learned from the EMC Open Innovation Lab service startup this year I wanted to discuss how we prioritize proposal requests. Anyone who has run a successful engineering team knows there is always more proposed work than resources available. The EMC OIL service is no different in that regard. What I did find different is we have many, many different type customers proposing projects including:
- EMC customers wanting to collaborate with us on a unique challenge
- EMC partners anxious to leverage our products in different combinations
- EMC Global Solutions Sales
- EMC product teams across our federation of companies including (VMware, Pivotal, and VCE)
- EMC Office of the CTO
As we introduced the OIL service we were inundated with a number project opportunity. During our startup in early July our lead, Bala Ganeshan anticipated having the need to govern proposed projects, especially since we were just starting to staff the team. Bala created an initial project prioritization process flow chart that was comprehensive but ultimately too cumbersome to try and administer.
We spent several weeks tuning and optimizing this process. This is a great example of his fail fast and fix mantra.
Since we are focused on executing rapid prototyping projects requiring no more than eight weeks to complete, we needed a lightweight proposal prioritization process. We optimized it down to a three phase process:
- Proposal Definition – describe project scope including the unmet business problem and the key deliverables. The customer, and partner that will collaborate with us on the project is also documented.
- Proposal Quantification – define resources required, risks, and revenue opportunities.
- Proposal Control Board (PCB) – provides approval to move to execution based on priority, and available resources. Approval makes the proposal an OIL project.
The PCB has representation from EMC senior Office of the CTO management, solution sales, and the OIL team. We have found most projects making it to the PCB are approved based on the diligence of the Definition, and Quantification phases.
We include in our discussion with our customers the process of creating an OIL proposal thru project approval and execution. This transparency has helped us create some great partnerships. Our customers know up front what it takes for an OIL proposal to become a project. Our process is also optimized to collect almost all the information necessary to transition a proposal to a project. This helps support our less than eight week project methodology.
My lessons learned from the OIL proposal prioritization process are:
- anticipate the need for a proposal prioritization process
- embrace the fail fast and fix mindset
- be transparent with the proposal prioritization process
- optimize the proposal approval process for delivery as well
By being flexible early, and embracing the need to modify the process we were able to quickly optimize and address our customers concerns. No one wants to work with a group with a difficult governance process. Customers were able to see us incorporating their feedback quickly.
We found our rapid prototype project methodology does not allow us much time to gather additional information after a proposal is approved. By optimizing our up front proposal process with the anticipation of executing a project we have been able to quickly get projects started. wit hthe information gathered we can anticipate labor and equipment resource requirements. I’m sure we will continue to optimize our OIL proposal prioritization process in 2014 based on our customer feedback and new types of proposals we are already starting to see.