Microsoft GTM Factory

Developed a customized Project Management Solution to help remove bottlenecks, streamline communication and increase global efficiency.

The Client

The Business Marketing Organization of Microsoft Corporation handles marketing content and resources for the company's go-tomarket (GTM) campaigns. These integrated value propositions bring together a set of unique products and technologies in a specialized way that directly addresses key customer needs.

The Challenge

Bringing GTM campaigns to market requires tight timelines and smooth collaboration because of the number of business groups that contribute and need GTM-related information. Within the company, the Microsoft Business Group establishes the high-level strategy for each GTM. Drawing from that work, the Microsoft Business Marketing Organization (BMO) then creates scenariospecific campaign materials and delivers them to the field marketing teams. The BMO draws on this information to create the campaign bill of materials for each GTM, which can include presentations, events, webcasts, or advertising. Microsoft marketers began to encounter problems meeting the deadlines for deliverables because the BMO lacked a consistent process for managing its large marketing projects.

Other key challenges included:

• Duplication of effort and project redundancies
• Inadequate benchmarks for evaluating project progress and task assignment
• Poor orchestration and collaboration among the multiple people working on GTM projects
• Missed deadlines due to insufficient means to manage process effectively
• Project management and collaboration outweighed the infrastructure

The Pcubed Solution

After gathering requirements, Pcubed developed a proof-of-concept study and prototypes, launching a pilot solution during the summer of 2003. Adjusted to reflect user feedback gathered during the pilot, version one of the GTM Factory was used by the BMO for GTM campaigns from October 2003 through January 2004. The first version consisted of two separate GTM Factory instances : one for the Business Group and one for the BMO.

During that time, the BMO users found the tool helpful for meeting key deadlines, but they also found it to be cumbersome. The tool used the same bill of materials for all the GTM campaigns, so it incorporated all possible tasks, whether they applied to a project or not. As a result, the BMO users requested that the GTM Factory be refined and simplified, particularly in the segment devoted to creating a bill of materials.

The company did not have to look far to find a solution to its needs for more consistent and transparent processes for GTM planning, building, executing and reporting. The Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution was ideally suited for the task at hand. To initiate the program, the BMO turned to Pcubed, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to help develop a customized Microsoft Office EPM Solution known internally as the GTM Factory.

Microsoft determined that providing both the Business Group and the Business Marketing Organization with standardized project management tools would improve communications and result in higher productivity, less confusion and more on-time content delivery. This consolidation greatly reduced the cost of the solution and allowed for dependency tracking between the Business Group and the BMO. A distinct feature of the EPM solution was the development of The Project Creation Wizard. This device automatically sets up a central repository for each GTM, so all documents associated with that GTM can be posted in a single place.

Key elements of the solution included:

• Smoother workflow from improved business insight
• Increased efficiency from greater collaboration
• Improved project status awareness
• Better management and user focus
• More on-time content delivery