Customer Focus Design for Window Server with PacITPros

On May 5th, I helped organize a special event for the Pacific IT Pros user group in San Francisco. Customer Focused Design is a process used by Microsoft to collect feedback about features and requirements that need improvement in future product development.
The goal of this event was to provide Microsoft with feedback related to the future of the Windows Server operating system. The Customer Focused Design team was very appreciative of the time PacITPros spent brainstorming together to during the session. They saw a lot of really good ideas and value come out of the session. Overall, the three groups provided over 300 individual requirements and close to 50 high level requirements where improvements could be made.
That information was distilled into the following series of slides:Group 1 (Kevin Lane) - 15 high level requirements, with 97 individual sticky requirements.Group 2 (Robert DeLuca) - 18 high level requirements, with 54 individual sticky requirements.Group 3 (Pat Fetty) - 16 high level requirements, with 174 individual sticky requirements.
The slides highlight the following information:
"Customer Importance" - this provides the prioritization of the requirements that were generated.
"Current Ability" - This is the PacITPros ranking of Microsoft’s ability to deliver this requirement right now based on the technology Microsoft provides in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008R2. The ranking numbers are:
1 = Microsoft doesn't deliver this at all
2-3 = you can do this with significant workarounds and/or 3rd party solutions
4-7 = Mircosoft delivers this with minimal workarounds or other applications
8-9 = Microsoft delivers this with no workarounds
10 = Microsoft couldn’t do this any better
"Improvement Pareto" - The requirements and the ability rankings are calculated together to determine the improvement areas needed for focus. Areas with high importance but low ability are areas that Microsoft needs to put some work into. Areas that are low mean that Microsoft needs less investment and effort to deliver what is needed.
Kudos to all the PacITPros members who participated. This was a hands-on way to have our voices heard directly by Microsoft.