Microsoft Management Mores
November 21, 2008
The secret to the effectiveness of Microsoft's Engineering team? A training strategy that manages learning both inside and outside the classroom.
By Alice Shepherd
All large organizations struggle with the task of managing learning and development. But when the organization is Microsoft Corp., whose customer base is the whole world and whose learners currently include about 36,000 engineers, that task becomes monumental. Microsoft's engineers design and develop products for both enterprises and consumers across vastly diverse cultures and with equally diverse needs and interests. The development of learning solutions, community engagements, and collaboration tools for these engineering professionals is the charge of Microsoft's Engineering Excellence (EE) team—a charge that is both exciting and dramatically complex.
Driving Engineering Excellence
Microsoft's EE team is a performance improvement group for the company's engineers around the world. The team evolved organically from a smaller organization whose original purpose was baseline technical training and development. Today, it consists of approximately 145 members, ranging from facilitators and designers of learning solutions to engineers developing collaboration tools and their managers and leaders. Its mission is "to discover, create, propagate, and deliver solutions that improve and revitalize engineering teams, increasing innovation, quality, and customer value."
Currently at the helm of the EE ship is General Manager Peter Loforte. Under Loforte's leadership, the Engineering Excellence team creates learning solutions, processes, tools, and resources, partnering with other talent management teams across the company. As a result, the team has a complex of diverse strategies and a few key areas of focus. In one of them, Engineering Learning and Development, the team is aligned with the rest of Microsoft learning groups in driving learning in three ways:
1. Learning through training. This is about traditional, formal, and informal training, including both classroom instruction and self-paced online programs.
2. Learning from others, such as peers, mentors, coaches, leaders, and communities of practice, and through shadowing and observing masters in the field.
3. Learning by doing, on the job, through diverse work experiences, consumption of on-demand resources, use of collaboration tools, assignments, and tasks that stretch the engineers' capabilities and allow them to develop their competencies to higher levels of proficiency. Learners discover and select developmental activities that are mapped to capabilities, place them on their learning plan, and, in collaboration with their supervisors, manage performance against them.
"Our strategy is to align people's learning and development not only with their ability to perform in their current roles and against their current performance objectives, but also with their overall career development and long-term contribution to Microsoft," says Irada Sadykhova, director of learning and organization effectiveness at Microsoft who leads one of the EE teams focusing on learning strategies, operations, and EE's internal tools and resources.
Although Microsoft is in the technology business, it demands from its engineers a very strong focus on customer-driven design. "It is Microsoft's conviction that any good product development should begin with the creation of a design and then a pursuit of that design ensues to deliver a product," Sadykhova explains. "Microsoft's product strategy starts from a value proposition for the customer; the same must be true for EE's learning solutions. When we pursue any kind of learning solution, we think about the value proposition first and in that way connect the solution to the learner."
The EE team defines its success as the bottom line difference it makes in the everyday life of every single engineer. "One can ask many different questions to understand one’s success," Sadykhova says. "The bottom line question for us is, when Microsoft engineers think about learning and other developmental resources, do they think of us first, and do they refer each other to us? The answer to that question is very telling."
Continue reading about Microsoft's EE's impact at Trainingmag.com.
Alice Shepherd is a Southern California-based business-to-business journalist specializing in training and development topics. For more information, visit www.tradepressservices.com or call 805-496-8850. To learn more about GeoMetrix Data Systems Inc.’s learning management system, TrainingPartner , call 800-616-5409 or visit www.trainingpartner.com
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