Esri in One Hour: Ben Schaub on the EEAP

I’ve actually been getting more confused on the Esri Enterprise Advantage Program (EEAP) as summer has progressed, so today I finally got to mentally download the right information on this area from Ben Schaub, who is currently the Program Manager for Advantage Programs at Esri.

Ben has worked at Esri for about 6 years, and has also worked with Josh before, so it was fun to talk to one of my mentor’s friends (and backpacking buddies). Ben started as a Project Manager, was based in DC for a while, and has now relocated to Redlands. He started supporting the EEAP program around 2 years ago.

The Esri Enterprise Advantage Program (EEAP) accounts for a huge amount of Professional Services work. The “Programs” that fall under professional services are EEAP and the Technical Consulting Program (TCP), which Jan Mares works with.

First and most importantly, I clarified what had been getting me most confused with the EEAP up until this point: the differences between “Programs” and “Projects” at Esri. A Project at Esri is the word for a large engagement with defined deliverables. Usually, a project has > 300k budget and itemized, set requirements, which fall under contract.

In distinction, programs, or EEAP endeavors (I’m avoiding using the word “projects” for an attempt at better clarity), are not contractually committed to delivering outcomes. EEAP provides consulting services, and any apps or products that come out of these engagements fall under more of the proof-of-concept category, or require more limited and flexible budget and timing (*I clarified this further with Kim Rohrs in our later conversation).

Ben then moved into a little bit of a presentation to guide our conversation about the EEAP.

EEAP officially lives in Professional Services, but Ben argues that it is really a Corporate Program. EEAP supports customers to use the full capabilities of the technology they have invested in through providing access to individuals the smart people across Esri that can bring unique problem-solving perspective and expertise. EEAP “connects down” to other offerings which users can access through the program.

The EEAP is an add-on to an Enterprise license through a 12-month subscription format. With this subscription to the EEAP, customers receive access to consulting, training, managed cloud services, certification exams, UC attendance, and strategy with steps to implementation. However, as mentioned before, the EEAP does not cover project work, and also does not provide unlimited tech support.

Each EEAP account is assigned a Technical Advisor, who Ben termed an “Esri interpreter” to the customer. Esri can be thought of as built with four key components: software, strategy, context, and people. Technical Advisors act as the touch-point and synthesis of all of these components for the customer, and as the consultant to get the customer where they want to, or could, go with ArcGIS and location intelligence.

(I had dubbed this section about what Technical Advisors and EEAP provide customers “EEAP Niceties” in my notes). Technical Advisors learn and also assist in developing customers’ visions for working with geography/location. EEAP engagements usually kick off each year with an all-day annual planning meeting with the Technical Advisor and multiple levels of the company. The Technical Advisor, Account Manager, and subject matter experts team up to prepare material for this initial meeting to both present to and learn from the customer and their goals. Through meeting with the customer in this annual planning meeting and through continued engagement, the Technical Advisor is tasked with connecting to the longer term vision organization. Following this initial meeting, the Technical Advisor documents a workplan, based on the customer’s goals and long-term vision, for the year-long EEAP engagement. However, this workplan is meant to be Agile, and is not a concrete document such as a project contract, for example.

EEAP is built upon the goal of collaboration between Esri and the customer. Unlike project-based work, which involved deliverables, EEAP delivers collaboration and enablement. Ben compared customer work with EEAP as a “team sport.” Companies that work with EEAP Technical Advisors (TAs) must make staff available for the EEAP engagement, including the annual planning meeting as well as potential training plans or work with new ArcGIS capabilities. TAs are expected to provide proactive advice, which includes exposure to new capabilities using ArcGIS and advice as developments and new releases come out. However, TAs are expected to provide configurable advice and developments first, which can rest soundly in the hands of the customers — “always teaching fishing.”

However, this proactive advice requires the customer showing up to gain benefit from EEAP advising. Formal knowledge transfer must occur for this to be successful. This involves the entire package of both the customer and the Technical Advisor’s work, from the annual planning meeting throughout the engagement. Customers receive credits through EEAP that can be used to buy all of the aforementioned components of EEAP. With the annual planning meeting, the TA also sketches out potential combinations for annual credit usage to best fulfill knowledge transfer and goals for that year. For example, credits can be used for training, to allow for more members of a company to gain expertise with elements of ArcGIS, or familiarity with GIS in general. In executing the workplan, the TA should develop focused activities to get the customer closer to their goals.

Uniquely, the annual planning meeting often includes meeting with executive sponsors and business level leads. This is tremendous for increasing awareness and adoption of GIS. GIS teams have historically hardly-ever engaged with executive levels of companies, but this annual planning meeting and continued engagement format allows for novel customer buy-in and engagement with the vast potential of GIS, communicated across company levels. This elevates GIS to part of company strategy.

Interestingly, the TA position demands interpersonal qualities to be successful with particular accounts. A good Technical Advisor must have a robust internal network at Esri, to know where to go to match a customer’s goal with the right experts at Esri. Also, there is a large element of personality-matching with a customer. Some EEAP accounts need a very technical TA for the goals or perspective of the customer. Others need more business-management level TAs to communicate GIS to non-GIS individuals, such as, potentially, company admin.

The rhythm of work with the customer is also important to think about, and a proper rhythm of tasks, check-ins, etc. must be established to collaboratively work toward goals. Most TAs have at least monthly meetings with the customer, and EEAP allows a budget for this. Some of this meetings will be reactive, and discuss what is coming up for the customer and ArcGIS. Others will be neutral check-ins or proactive planning sessions.

This is the 14th year of EEAP, and it sounds like it is resulting in value for the customer and a lot of the Professional Services engagements. There is also a Business Partner Advantage Program (BPAP), which is slightly different, but we didn’t go into much detail about the distinctions between these programs. I also asked if there were EEAP engagements internationally—these are similar, but slightly different as well.

We discussed an application/resource map showing current EEAP accounts and outstanding proposals. There are currently ~100 TAs working in Professional Services, out of ~600 employees in PS. There are EEAP accounts going on across the country, and the world, and there are a massive number of potential EEAPs, a growing number each day it seems.

We then talked about a couple of EEAP examples so I could visualize this better. The first example he gave me was WAWA, an east coast convenience store (well-loved by my Pennsylvania friends). WAWA has been an EEAP customer for 3 or 4 years. They started out with a simple ArcGIS subscription, adding on EEAP. Through this EEAP engagement, Esri helped WAWA pilot workflows such as site selection and site/chain management. Additionally, now WAWA had more than 200 GIS users in less than a year. Their team was so committed to learning ArcGIS themselves that they carved out a GIS team and GIS “center of excellence” within the organization.

Another example was a local government example in a region of Kentucky. Through EEAP, a Technical Advisor helped this local government to evolve through not having established a GIS presence to working with GIS.

I asked about areas of growth for EEAP. As ArcGIS and GIS moves to being a “system of systems,” emphasizing collaboration within ArcGIS Online, this will likely be an area to move customers toward with the help of EEAP consulting. Also, jumpstarts to integrate these collaboration systems, such as portal to portal collaboration, will also be in order.

Ben saw the biggest areas of growth for EEAP as:

1. State and Local Government
2. Federal Government
3. Commercial
4. Utilities

In general, EEAP seems to be growing quickly as an easy and approachable way for customers to gain Esri support with their software, and really helps expose customers to the potential uses and benefits of ArcGIS.

Ben mentioned that focus can be a problem for TAs, especially when they are tasked with not only multiple accounts but also project management in other areas of Professional Services, or TA is not their first job title. He mentioned the idea of establishing full-time TAs to allow them to focus more on their accounts. Also, EEAP will probably need to add TAs to manage the growing number of accounts, as well as delegate accounts to a larger group, to lighten up the number of accounts for some TAs to allow for greater focus. Also, I think there would most likely be an element of consulting training or personality matching with these approaches, which would allow for more specificity in assigning TAs that would work well with specific customers. Additionally, EEAP needs to distinguish itself from project work. Ben thinks that EEAP must clearly identify its boundaries, to make sure customers don’t overstep them and turn work into project-level work that would be better served by an RFP process and contractual work with Professional Services.

There are a lot of interesting things at play here, not to mention such a vast number of accounts, and this is definitely an interesting area of growth to me.