In response to my blog Welcome to the Room, Davor Vukovic asked the question:

I might be mistaken, but don’t the required resources result from defining a theory of success (i.e., the solution)? My understanding is that you first define a plausible theory of success and then evaluate it against the available resources, not the other way around; then adjust.

Done correctly, resource allocation is a cold-blooded discipline. At Microsoft, we learned this lesson through years of randomness and drama before Ballmer got us heading in the right direction and Satya Nadella and Amy Hood turned that into a well-oiled machine. In the meeting I described, Satya tells the executives exactly what they have to work with. There is no whining. There is only the requirement to manufacture success within those constraints.

Before that meeting, there was a process to gather all the proposals from throughout the company. These typically took the form of:
– Industry trends
– Our opportunity.
– Why we win.
– Resources required.

This was the Lord of the Flies/Game of Thrones stage of resource allocation. Satya and Amy ran those Hunger Games and the output was the large-grain strategic resource allocations. That was decided before the meeting. By the time you got into “The Room,” the window for negotiation was closed. This is what Satya was referring to when he said:

We’ve done our homework.  
We’ve evaluated the portfolio, considered the opportunities and allocated our available resources to those opportunities.
That is what you have to work with. 
Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated.

The time for discussions and negotiations was over. It was time to shut up and execute or get out to make room for someone who would. Most often, teams did not get the resources they needed to execute the grand strategy they had in their head. Now it was time for them to pull a Kobayashi Maru because failure was not an option. You don’t get more ships; you rewrite the rules of the simulation.

Manufacturing success often meant taking dependencies on other teams. If you didn’t have the headcount to build a custom solution, you were forced to use the standard one. Resource allocation isn’t just about money; it’s the most effective weapon for killing redundancy and enforcing architectural alignment. If you can’t afford to build your own silo, you finally start acting like a platform company.