My First ‘Vision’ Engagement.

Last week I got to experience my first ‘Vision’ workshop from start to finish. I have to say, I am completely blown away to see this group in action. I rode along for mentoring and thoroughly enjoyed seeing how many ‘big brains’ we had engaged from VMware’s perspective and how much interaction and participation we were able to get from the company we were helping. The magic of the way we engage seems to be the ability to get CIO’s and CTO’s and IT VP’s all in the room at the same time discussing strategic initiatives that the company needs to achieve in the next 3-5 years. I have personally been on over a thousand customer meetings in the last 5-6 years and I have never been in a meeting that had as many strategic IT management people as these meetings had last week.

Another key aspect of what I was impressed by was the efficiency of the engagement. I asked my mentor: “How long do we typically take to get a full strategy together… 3 months? 6 months?” He laughed and said: “Our goal is to get every engagement we do completely executed in under 30 days.” I did a double-spit-take on that one. How could we possibly understand the organizations’ goals, talk to all groups within IT that are involved, assess where they are today and do a gap analysis, get with the SME’s and discuss possible solutions, put together a roadmap, tie the roadmap to specific work packages, discuss with PSO organization to align resources and project scopes, put together a full product list with pricing, generate a proposal, and get it all presented back to the customer in less than 30 days?!?! Once again, I was greeted with a smile and given the look of: “Watch this, rook… we are about to blow your mind.” Indeed they did.

Day 1: We all arrived at a hotel near the customer the day before the first meeting. I watched as people starting rolling into the conference room and introduced myself. I was shocked as more and more people came into the room. At the end of the flow, we had anyone and everyone from VMware that would be involved with the account. The TAM, the account manager, the SE, the SSM, SME’s from each discipline (VEUC, Cloud, Etc), and then the vision team members. (The BSS and BSA team.) I have to say, I was extremely impressed. I have never really been in a position where getting all these people in the same room at the same time would be possible. Then, the magic happened. Reid Engstrom was my BSS on this account. (Yes, I am the BSA on this account, with my mentor John Steiner helping whip me into fighting form.) Reid is to me as Gandalf was to Frodo. He is absolutely a candidate for ‘the most interesting man alive’ and has been in amazing roles in this industry. His previous experience was as CTO of one of my favorite companies… Harley-Davidson. He immediately took the reins and kicked things off. With a wisdom born of experience he laid-out the agenda for the following two days, explained the process we would go through, cleared-up any questions and then instructed each member of the team what their role was and made sure they were enabled to deliver their piece of the puzzle. We went through together, as a team, each persons’ presentation and polished them up. Each person gave feedback and was engaged. It was the most collaboration I have witnessed. Amazingly… it was done in about 4 hours.

Day 2: We arrive onsite at the customer at 8:00AM and start to sit down. All the VMware team came in and then it was clear that there were just as many people from the companies’ IT department. As we started introductions, that is when I was bewildered again. CIO, CTO, VP of App Dev, VP of Infrastructure, VP of Mainframe, CSO. They were all there! At the same time! Then, we listened as the CIO level-set us on their top goals, challenges, etc and we went through our prepared presenters… gathering absolutely amazing amounts of information from the IT executive team. At one point, I actually threw a question out expecting that everyone would vehemently disagree. I asked: “Based on what you have told me, do you think you are at risk of having ‘Shadow IT’ in your environment?” After I clarified what Shadow IT is, they all answered: “Oh yeah… I am SURE we do! But, today, we have no way of knowing… they don’t need approval for anything under $100K..” I sat there stunned. They were being completely transparent. Completely divulging information to us. And then it dawned on me….

“WE were doing THEM a favor. And they were grateful for it.”

No one had ever engaged them in this manner before. No one had come to them to bring the forces to bear to affect real transformative change in their environment. They were getting extreme pressure from the industry competitors (Amazon, Google, Teremark[Verizon]) and needed help. So much so, they spent 4 hours with us to give us as much data as we needed. 4 HOURS! ;-p

Day 2 – Part 2: After our meeting with the team, Reid gathered us all up back at the hotel conference room and we began our debriefing. We went through what we heard. Did a rough swipe of a SWOT analysis. Identified risks to them and us. We gathered everyones’ notes. (Reid actually has pre-built notes pages designed in order to ensure people capture relevant data in the workshop… awesome.) After gathering this, we then shifted gears to identify next steps and give people ownership of follow-ups.

All in all, after only two days of meetings it was amazing to see the amount of work that we completed in a fully collaborative fashion. It truly felt like 1+1 = 3 when we left. We are still in the middle of this, but I am extremely certain this engagement will be completed within 30 days. Amazing.