It's been about 8 months since the new OCP organization and design was rolled out at Microsoft Inspire. I asked Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft's  "Channel Chief", to come to the podcast and share with our listeners her thoughts on what's been going well thus far and where she sees the opportunities for continued growth and improvement in the Microsoft Partner business.

My questions for Gavriella focused on the state of the partner business, what's she seeing during this amazing transformation, what in store for all of the attendees this year at Microsoft Inspire, leadership lessons from her career, and her interaction with Satya Nadella.

 Q: I've heard positive feedback from both interview guests at Microsoft and partners regarding the change in transformation, but change is not easy. Based on the feedback you've received, and I know you just recently returned from an overseas trip where you met with partners, if you could go back to last year, is there anything that you would have done differently when you were planning the new OCP model?

Gavriella:           That's a great question, Vince. I mean I say that this is such a significant change in how we've approached partnerships and basically with the changes we've made really tied to our whole sales model, how we've approached customers that we knew that there were really going to be areas that would be revealed after we rolled out the model and I would say that the things that I would have changed in doing a Monday Morning Quarterback is more communications, more frequently to drive clarity with our field teams and with our sales teams. Because this was such a significant change, it's taken awhile for people to really internalize and understand what their new role is and all of the tools and the resources that we've made available to them. I think I would've spent more time out in the field with each of the teams and then really driving cross team collaboration between our enterprise sales teams and our partner teams because we give that a little bit later when we saw some of the seams between roles. I would have done it earlier.

Vince: You bring up a really great point. I started this podcast because I believed from my talks at Microsoft and Partners that Microsoft needs to scale this message more broadly and we have a growing set of partners in the ecosystem and partners need to stay in greater lockstep through all the change.

Q: What steps are you thinking in terms of how to better scale programs and resources so that partners can stay better connected during all of this change and transformation?

Gavriella:           One of my key learnings is the first thing we need to do is make sure we simplify because when we have a simpler program or simpler sets of engagement, simpler tools, it is easier for people to engage on it and understand it. It's more intuitive so we need to continue to derive for simplicity and eliminate the noise. There are always so many things that we want to do. I think we tend to put too much into the market at the same time. So that's one thing is to clear the noise. I think the second thing is just to have communication all the time in an ongoing business through blogs, through ongoing emails out to our partners and then we have a lot of webcasts and calls and constant conversations with our field. One of the things that we've put in place since we started this change in July is regional business leads and those regional business leads are part of my team, but they actually live out in the regions and we do ... they sit in every single one of our meetings in corporate, but then their job is to help us land that both with the partners locally as well as with our field.

Q: What are the one or two things you believe the changes have had the most positive impact on the business and for partners?