Digital Transformation Adviser

Keys To Successful EMC Open Innovation Lab Launch - Part III

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.  

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Staffing the Team

 As part of reflecting on my experiences building the EMC Open Innovation Lab (OIL) service over the last half of the year I learned a number of lessons working with Bala Ganeshan to staff the team.

In 2013, we started with six engineers on the team. Early on two of our engineers joined other teams leaving us with our “core four” engineers. Bala Ganeshan, Txomin Barturen, and Eoghan Kelleher had been successful product and solution engineers for several years and knew how to get things done internally. I was the only one that had recently spent the majority of time engaged directly with customers and our field sales teams.

As we set out to double the size of the team we worked on a new target hiring profile based on our OIL charter. The target profile was different from our Office of CTO, field engineer, and product engineering profile. It actually combines components of each. We wanted engineers with previous success working directly with EMC customers and sales teams. We also needed people that would embrace the innovation thinking we needed. Knowing how EMC or the industry previously solved these problems would not help us produce first in kind prototypes. With Bala, Txomin, and Eoghan we also had deep knowledge on our existing products and solutions that would be leveraged. The final skill set we realized we needed was the desire by the candidate to have the strong desire to learn new technologies, explore industry trends, and be able to work collaboratively. The best candidates not only worked with their network of subject matter experts (SME) but to quickly leverage others network of SME’s.

Looking at much of the literature there is a strong case to be made that we needed to hire people outside of EMC to bring new idea’s to the problems we were planning to tackle. Working with our EMC HR recruiting partner, Ken Persel, we advertised the new job description and had a number of strong internal and external candidates. We decided to consider both internal and external candidates equally. We focused on candidates that had a strong preference for external engagement with customers and the industry.

We ended up hiring three experienced EMC engineers, Jim Ruddy, Cody Hosterman, and Jonas Rosland. These guys all have worked across multiple technology platforms and are all active on social media through twitter and their personal blogs.  You can frequently read about their discoveries, observations, and the projects they are leading. At the end of this year Nalin Mistry joined our team and has been a great help sharing his previous OIL experience at other tech companies.

My key learnings building the OIL team this year are:

• Spend the time to build a clear hiring profile
• Focus on hiring the best candidates without limiting yourself to just internal or external candidates
• Review the persons social media profile

Building a good hiring profile allowed our HR recruiter to quickly understand the type of candidates we wanted. He was able to market to the appropriate recruiting services for the best candidates.

I feel having a strong hiring profile made it easy to target candidates with strong industry brands. Candidates that were working directly with customers was clearly more important than hiring from outside EMC.

The third lesson I learned is a person’s social media profile is a much more important than their resume and in some cases as important as the interview. Looking at people’s blog posts and tweets shows a candidates thinking and tendencies. As an example, it is easy to see if they are deep and narrow in their expertise or tend to be broader in their interests.

What are your current hiring best practices? 

Keys To Successful EMC Open Innovation Lab Launch

Part 1 - Defining and Communicating the Service Charter

Earlier this year I introduced the new Open Innovation Lab (OIL) service we created at EMC this year. I have many lessons learned from the experience of creating a new innovation service in a large product technology company like EMC.

In a series of posts, I will review my experiences and key learnings in four key areas:

• Defining and communicating the service charter
• Staffing the team
• Creating the project prioritization process
• Create a repeatable project execution methodology

This past week we spent time planning for 2014. 2013 was certainly our startup year and we knew we needed to let customers know about this new offering from EMC. The EMC OIL charter is:

“to engage with EMC customers and partners to prototype first in kind solutions and to share the results back to our product and solution engineering teams.”

Early on we set a goal to have everyone on the OIL team to educate customers, partners, and EMC field sales teams about our new service. Initialy we met with customers, and partners many of us already knew or were introduced to through our Global Solution Sales organization.  We also met with many customers and partners through our Executive Briefing Program and industry events such as VMworld, and Hadoopworld.

This OIL charter has been enthusiastically received. Customers and partners find the charter clear and easy to understand. The scope of the charter is broad enough to create many opportunities to engage with us.

Meeting with customers, partners, and EMC sales teams to educate them on our OIL service was beneficial for three reasons:

• Let people know the service existed
• Customers engaged with EMC in a non-traditional manner
• Built a pipeline a project opportunities

Many times we have engaged in brainstorming sessions with customers and partners to understand their business challenges and document the key success factors of a solution. Many of these sessions have turned into OIL projects while others have resulted in projects we passed to our product engineering and/or our engineering Centers of Excellence teams.

Since we created a clear, and easy to understand charter, we were able to have the entire team communicate our service. This allowed us to identify high quality project opportunities which quickly led to several successful engagements such as the creation of the Hadoop Starter Kit.

The lessons I learned in 2013 are:

• It is critical with a new service to have early successful projects. Nothing generates more interest than successful projects that result in tangible benefits for customers and revenue potential for sales teams.
• When creating a new service it is vital to have a clear, and easy to understand charter. It is critical you then communicate the service to a broad audience quickly. The charter and message can be quickly updated based on the feedback from your potential customers.  

2013 was a startup year for the EMC OIL service. Our charter remains unchanged for 2014 and we will continue to communicate the value of our service in order to built a quality pipeline of projects. We know customer communication and delivery of successful projects is going to be a key to our 2014 success.

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