Microsoft came close to killing off its “ThinkWeek” process, via which employee-submitted ideas can find their way into the hands of upper management for consideration. But it sounds like Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie & Co. have decided not to do away with this idea generation/evaluation pipeline.
ThinkWeek” referred to the twice-annual retreats by Microsoft chairman and founder Bill Gates, during which he combed through research papers, articles, books and employee-contributed product and strategy suggestions as part of his process for setting Microsoft’s near- and long-term directions.
I asked this week for an update on ThinkWeek and received this response from a company spokesperson:
“Microsoft is launching a new ThinkWeek program this summer to tap into the great ideas from Microsoft employees around the world. Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie, along with other technical leaders, designed the program to socialize and champion the best ideas across the company and help turn them into reality.”
Ozzie announced the revised ThinkWeek program internally earlier this week at Microsoft’s Engineering Forum, the spokesperson said.
ThinkWeek isn’t Microsoft’s only vehicle for employee ideas to trickle up to management. Microsoft also has a program known as “Quests,” which Microsoft kicked off in 2006. Quests are a long-term planning tool Microsoft officials are using to collect ideas about more than 70 topic areas the company brass believe are key to the company’s future.
Microsoft veteran and Chief Technical Officer David Vaskevitch had been serving as the head of the Quests. But now Quests are being managed out of Ozzie’s organization, the spokesperson confirmed, and Vaskevitch, as of late May, is now reporting to Bob Muglia, President of Microsoft’s Server and Tools business. It’s not clear whether Ozzie’s unit will be reworking Quests the way they have done ThinkWeek.
Update (September): Actually, it looks like the Quests program is being phased out. Jack Gudenkauf, a member of Microsoft’s Technical Strategy Group blogged in August 2009:
“You might have heard recently that the Quest program is concluding and making way for a new way to look at long-range planning at the division level and cross company. Well, all that’s true, quests were successful and we are now refining what we do to a new level given that we are executing better than we were in those days and we’re structured differently now.”
According to Vaskevitch’s biography on Microsoft’s Web site, he is working with Muglia “to develop a focused and unified strategy and architecture for future Microsoft platforms.” Vaskevitch was unavailble for comment on his new role and Microsoft officials didn’t respond to a request for more detailed information on specifically what Vaskevitch will be doing.
