If you've ever wondered how HP chooses enhancements for its HP 3000 line, look no further than the customer base. HP says that's the most important input that drives the Solution Team concept, a process the Commercial Systems Division (CSY) uses to target its enhancement to-do list. HP is now forming new Solution Teams to handle enhancements for the HP 3000 -- the means to apply continuing investments in MPE/iX systems for 1997 and beyond.
HP's investment decisions frequently become the subject of discussion among customers, especially its business partners who sell software and services for the HP 3000. As a recent example, CSY's decision not to proceed earlier with a 32-bit ODBC driver for IMAGE has come under fire from customers who want the functionality included in their operating systems. On the other hand, the division's choice to port the OpenMarket Web server software may well open up the HP 3000 to electronic commerce markets at a time when interest is highest.
Decisions such as these are made months before a major release of the operating system. That's when HP anticipates large blocks of its resources -- that's engineering talent, in plainer terms -- will be freed up. The planning process that leads to investments starts before those resources become available.Winston Prather, the R&D manager for CSY, said the process begins by asking what you want from your HP 3000.
"We really have a lot of sources, but they all come back to the customer," Prather said. Division general manager Harry Sterling and marketing manager Cathy Fitzgerald travel to visit customers and speak at user group meetings along with Prather, "collecting data from customers, from trips, factory visits or from the Special Interest Groups (SIGs)."
Who's on the team
HP identifies major areas of investment and designates them as solution
teams, the formal label for a flexible group of engineers, product
marketing experts and the division's top managers. As part of this fall's
5.5 release of MPE/iX, HP had solution teams designated such as
Well-behaved in a Unix Environment and High Availability. Within those
areas, HP provided enhancements such as network printing and online disk
and tape configuration, respectively.
Prather said that while this year's list of teams wasn't finalized, he said it was likely that CSY would form 1997 teams dedicated to Vertical Growth, Interoperability and the Internet, Database and Application Products, Datacenter Management including peripherals, and Horizontal Growth. The last team would look at how to provide solutions that can help customers trying to spread applications across multiple HP 3000s.
Customer Delight, a team that brought users the improvements in VPlus for the 5.5 Release, is a constant team. Prather said it's designed to support the smaller projects that don't fit neatly in other teams but are requested by a lot of customers. "These are things that would have been missed through the normal process," Prather said.
The teams get chosen on the basis of customer interviews, as well as input from the annual meeting in Cupertino of HP's Customer Advisory Council of more than a dozen companies. The Council is an expansion of the old Hundred Plus club of HP 3000 sites, those companies where more than 100 HP 3000s are at work.
"It's an extension to the normal customer visit process, where they would hear about our plans," Prather said. "We spend a lot of time listening to them evaluate what we think we want to do, and taking in a lot of feedback."
The large-site emphasis of the Council is balanced by the input from the SIGs, where any customer willing to invest the time to communicate can have a voice in the development process. Prather said that HP has renewed its dedication to work more closely with the SIGs.
A Solution Team can vary in size and composition, "but it always includes R&D and marketing representation, and almost always includes support such as Expert Center and Response Center representatives," Prather said.
With a team in place, HP assigns a manager, someone who has background and expertise in the area and can sift the opinions and requests from customers. Team managers are often CSY managers, but its architects can sometimes be team managers for smaller solutions. Prather said that if the Database and Application Products solution team sticks, HP database lab manager Jon Bale would be a likely choice to lead that team.
The managers are then given a rough estimate of how much HP is ready to invest in the team. "We give the manager some sort of feel for the amount of investment we think we're going to be able to put in that area," Prather said.
Partners who are customers
Team managers then start "partnering" with customers and SIGs to collect
information on how to satisfy a requirement. For example, in the 5.5
release, the goal of the Patch Management team wasn't to produce Patch/iX
-- it was to reduce customer dissatisfaction with the MPE/iX patch
process.
HP calls things like Patch/iX "components" in its Solution Teams, and it checks with customer partners along the way to ensure that its components are solving pieces of the problem. These partners are customers who are willing to dedicate several hours or more per week to discuss and review ideas and development designs that HP's engineers bring to them. The ideas can often be vetoed or modified before any serious development is underway.
"We find out some interesting things in the process," Prather said. "A lot of times engineers will have great ideas, and customers say 'That sounds interesting, but I really wouldn't use that.' It really tweaks our plan."
A review of that feedback from the customer partners then happens at an executive level of CSY, where Sterling, Fitzgerald, Prather and others hear team managers' proposals on how to solve the problems. "That's where it starts to turn into R&D projects, marketing efforts or work with support," Prather said.
The managers' implementation recommendations get scrutinized by the executive group at CSY. Each component is examined, head counts are refined, "and then we say go," Prather explained, "and the development process actually starts."
A solution team isn't necessarily an implementation team, Prather added. The solution team "determines what we need to do, and then manages it throughout the process."
Some solutions have as many as 30 different customers as partners, some as few as 10. HP looks for up to 100 customers in total to contact on a weekly basis for review of its design documents.
There's been much interest in becoming a partner, he added, but most customers decide they can't commit such an extended amount of time to a single part of their work environment. HP will try to improve on the process by communicating more directly to the SIGs about Solution Team requirements and milestones. The March 3 IPROF meeting in Santa Clara, Calif. will be a significant input point for many customers, Prather added. HP will identify the SIGs that match up with the Solution Teams to help HP 3000 customers move to the advocacy group that best fits their interests, he said.
Even with all the opportunity for customer input, projects that customers request still get left off the list. But Prather says the Solution Teams keep HP closer to its installed base customers when deciding where to spend its resources.
"I view the solution life cycle as a process that ensures we're doing two things -- solving real customer problems, and checking to see we're using customer focus approaches throughout the process."