Microsoft Straightens Up

Microsoft's Office team, for example, is gearing up for organizational changes for the Office 14 (post-Office 2007) release, CRN has learned. Chief among the proposed tweaks will be the elimination of a layer of management that had been instituted with the Office 12 (aka Office 2007) development cycle. Those "uber-managers" headed up groups of development, test and group program managers.

It turns out these jobs were hard to define and their existence led to confusion even as they eased the collection and aggregation of project data. The problem was overlap between what these managers themselves were doing and what their direct reports did, according to a memo sent by Antoine LeBlond, corporate vice president for Office Productivity Applications, and viewed by CRN.

LeBlond and Kurt DelBene share the reins of the critical Information Worker group responsible for the Microsoft Office juggernaut. LeBlond heads up the Office client team and related areas. DelBene is corporate vice president for the Office Business Platform and is charged with overseeing the server-oriented SharePoint, Groove and Project lineups. They stepped into those roles in June after Steven Sinofsky moved over to the Windows side of the house.

The unit will reorganize from a fairly large number of small teams to a smaller number of large teams, to eliminate organizational boundaries and foster better communication between the various groups. Paradoxically, LeBlond maintains that the fewer, bigger groups will facilitate agility.

In addition, each manager will oversee a minimum of four people. Ideal team size will be closer to five or six people per manager, according to the memo.

The group was close to designating the key development, test and group program managers for Office 14 last week. This, as the company prepped a technical refresh of Office 2007 Beta 2.

A source close to Microsoft said that in the past few years, the company has "hyper-inflated" titles in order to keep good people. "They rewarded good people who maybe were not cut out for management with a bunch of titles. Sounds like now they'll regroup people and have them reporting to others. Some egos will get bruised, but hey, they're grownups, and in engineering, people are used to working in teams," the source said.