There are many great approaches to solutions development. So, why would Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) be right for you, your project, and/or your organization? To help answer that question, you must first understand what you are actually looking for. Are you looking for a few "nuggets" to improve your current development approach, or are you looking for a new soup-to-nuts approach? Or maybe, are you just curious about how Microsoft approaches solutions development? This book answers these questions by sharing with you an industry-proven approach to delivering solutions. It provides years of Microsoft solutions delivery experience and lessons learned distilled into a flexible and scalable framework. The framework can be adapted to meet the needs of any project (regardless of size or complexity) to plan, build, and deploy business-driven technology solutions.
This book explains the foundational principles and proven practices of the Microsoft Solutions Framework. MSF provides an adaptable framework for successfully delivering solutions faster, requiring fewer people, and involving less risk while yielding higher quality results. MSF helps teams directly address most common causes of technology project failure to improve success rates, solution quality, and business impact. Created to deal with the dynamic nature of technology projects and environments, MSF fosters the ability to adapt to continual change within the course of a project.
MSF has a long history of helping teams and organizations become more successful in delivering business-driven solutions. MSF is a deliberate and disciplined approach based on a defined set of principles, models, disciplines, guidelines, mindsets, and proven practices. It contains a set of natural checks and balances that work to maximize quality and agility without adding undue governance. MSF is applicable to any effort that involves thinking about what needs to be accomplished; planning how to accomplish it; doing it; making sure it meets expectations; and wrapping up the effort, including learning from the effort. MSF has been successfully used on projects from the very simple to the very complex, from small teams to an enterprise.
MSF is in its fourth iteration. This version update, like previous version updates, comes in response to changing environments and an increased and broader understanding of how teams deliver solutions. The original version of MSF was first introduced in 1994 as a loose collection of best practices from Microsoft’s product development efforts and Microsoft Consulting engagements. As shown in Figure 1-1, MSF has been evolving ever since based on deliberate learning from successful, real-world best practices of Microsoft product groups, Microsoft Consulting, Microsoft’s internal Operations and Technology Group (OTG), Microsoft partners, and customers. Elements of MSF are based on well-known industry best practices and incorporate Microsoft’s more than 30 years of experience in the high-tech industry. These elements are designed to work together to help practitioners and managers address many significant challenges encountered throughout a technology life cycle.
MSF uses this pool of real-world best practices, which have been proved both internally and externally. It simplifies, consolidates, and verifies them for easier understanding and adoption. Now a robust and mature framework, MSF is managed and developed by a dedicated product team within Microsoft, with guidance and review from an international advisory council of subject matter experts. MSF also continues to draw upon current Microsoft experience. Other teams within various Microsoft lines of business regularly create, find, and share best practices and tools internally. Learning from these internal project efforts is consolidated and distributed outside of Microsoft through MSF.