Amazing Apps &#8211; learn how to build agile Dynamics 365 and Power Platform business apps using Scrum

MY ONLINE COURSES

Mentioned in this episode:

Subscribe to my new Estimating Business Apps podcast mini-series

Estimating Business Apps is a five-part podcast that will help you quickly, accurately and confidently estimate complex Power Platform and Dynamics 365 apps in minutes. Listen now: https://estimating-business-apps.captivate.fm/listen

Unpacking User Stories and Backlog Refinement with Dani Kahil

6 november 2023 | 49 min

Super CRM: a case study

2 oktober 2023 | 20 min

A Big Bang? Going Live with Dynamics 365 or Power Platform with Andrew Bibby

19 september 2023 | 46 min

#150. What does it take to have a successful go live event for your Dynamics 365 or Power Platform application. Neil Benson sat down with Andrew Bibby, a seasoned expert in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform business applications. In this episode, Andrew shares his insights on the crucial process of preparing for and executing a successful go live. From addressing technical difficulties to promoting user adoption and measuring success, Andrew sheds light on the often-overlooked aspects of post-delivery project management. He also discusses the importance of training, involving change champions, and effective communication in ensuring a smooth transition. Don't miss this informative episode filled with practical tips for achieving a seamless go-live and maximizing return on investment!

RESOURCES

Andrew Bibby on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewbibby/
Proximo3 on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/proximo3/
Proximo3 website: https://proximo3.com/
Nordic Summit: https://nordicsummit.info/
South Coast Summit: https://www.southcoastsummit.com/

TIMESTAMPS
03:26 Phased go-live events for Dynamics 365
06:06 Effort in successful go-live leads to happiness
08:34 Preparation and rehearsal lead to a successful go-live
12:39 Prepare and do steps before go-live
15:36 Early user involvement is vital for successful projects
21:17 Insufficient thought put into IT project training
25:45 Change management ensures successful projects and user adoption
30:07 Change management enhances project success and communication
33:02 Choosing a go-live day
38:20 Metrics, monitoring, and justification are crucial
42:30 The importance of getting across your message, and change management

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

Mentioned in this episode:

Subscribe to my new Estimating Business Apps podcast mini-series

Estimating Business Apps is a five-part podcast that will help you quickly, accurately and confidently estimate complex Power Platform and Dynamics 365 apps in minutes. Listen now: https://estimating-business-apps.captivate.fm/listen

Breaking Free from the Tyranny of the Deliverable with Andrew Welch

6 september 2023 | 26 min

#149. Andrew Welch is the Chief Technology Officer at HSO. Andrew is an expert in IT strategy and has a wealth of experience advising customers on their big strategic technology decisions. He is also an author, Microsoft MVP, and a regular presenter at conferences. Joining us today, Andrew shares valuable insights on the importance of IT leadership, cloud ecosystems, data platforms, artificial intelligence, and the future of innovation in technology.

We dive into the concept of the "Tyranny of the Deliverable" and how it relates to IT organizations organizing themselves into technology-focused teams. Andrew also discusses the need for a holistic approach to digital transformation and the role of a cloud strategist in piecing together various technical components to drive business value. If you're an IT leader, architect, or consultant, this episode is packed with valuable perspectives and tips from Andrew Welch. Don't miss it!

TIMESTAMPS

02:09 Importance of CIOs leading technology ecosystem integration.

04:48 Enterprise architects focus on specific workloads. Another architect, a cloud strategist, is needed for building capabilities and driving business value.

07:55 Microsoft's platform is versatile for mix and match.

11:11 Lunch with Ana Demeny, discussing Microsoft versus Google.

16:09 AI investment: data consolidation for value-delivery.

20:26 Tyranny of the deliverable: siloed teams, wrong solutions, budget incentives, counterproductive. Solution: subscription as a service model. Move away from hourly charges and fixed scopes.

24:55 Andrew presenting 5 strategies at Nordic Summit.

RESOURCES

Andrew Welch on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewdwelch

Andrew's blog: CloudLight.House: https://CloudLight.house

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform UK User Groups: https://d365ppug.com

Nordic Summit, 23 September 2023: https://nordicsummit.info

Forceworks Services-as-a-Subscription: https://forceworks.com/the-works-from-forceworks

CONNECT

🌏 Amazing Apps website

MY ONLINE COURSES

Keep experimenting 🧪

-Neil

Amazing CRM & ERP Apps in Manufacturing with Shawn Tabor

21 augusti 2023 | 33 min

Power Platform pipelines or Azure DevOps pipelines for ALM? with Benedikt Bergmann

21 augusti 2023 | 34 min

Can you really gain competitive advantage with Dynamics 365? with Martin Hinshelwood

1 augusti 2023 | 42 min

Chris Huntingford Doesn't Believe in Citizen Developers

19 juli 2023 | 39 min

Joining an existing team as a new scrum master with Matthew Venamore

5 juli 2023 | 37 min

Who do we need in our Business Apps team?

23 juni 2023 | 23 min

Smaller Teams, Bigger Wins: how to split your enterprise apps teams

2 juni 2023 | 13 min

Architects in a Scrum Teams with Allan de Castro

19 maj 2023 | 37 min

#141. In this episode of Amazing Apps, podcast host Neil Benson is joined by Allan de Castro, a senior technical consultant for the Power Platform at Avanade France.

They discuss their experience applying Scrum to recent projects, including the role of an architect in the Scrum framework. The episode covers key challenges such as the importance of ensuring clarity in the backlog, prioritization of sprints, and addressing technical requirements while focusing on business and added value.

[00:06:23] Allan, an architect and technical lead, discusses the challenge of finding their place in a team using the Scrum framework for the first time, and navigating discussions related to technical requirements and architecture while also focusing on business requirements and added value.

[00:10:15] Focus on delivering continuous testing value during sprints, even if it means sacrificing some business value.

[00:11:56] Agile and Scrum framework used for new project, integrating systems and iterating for development. Customer familiarity with Agile important.

[00:13:12] Capture project requirements early to avoid issues in development.

[00:16:36] Business analyst helps product owner with basic questions on application building, including object lifecycle. Dynamics 365 provides out-of-the-box features, such as bulk edit mode, without development needed. It can be demonstrated in demo instead of user story.

[00:19:10] To successfully execute a Dynamics 365 project using Scrum framework, it is important to ensure technical requirements are included in the backlog and fully estimated. It is also important to train the customer on Dynamics 365 and focus on prioritization during sprints. Custom development must fit into the security models provided by Dynamics. Workshops may be needed to refine new business requirements.

[00:24:06] Team delivers daily or every two days into the UAT environment, with testing by a quality insurance person and a dual check by the project owner or business analyst before marking as done. UAT phases were conducted initially, but now testing is continuous without UAT phases.

[00:26:13] The architecture and requirements were complicated due to unclear data sources and ongoing system construction. Agile methodology requires clear definitions before development, and cultural differences affect analysis phases. Workshop and design are necessary for identifying potential risks and managing sales territory was a major concern.

[00:31:14] Ensure clear backlog, communicate dynamics to team and stakeholders, define sprint process, architect advisory role, avoid influencing sprints.

[00:32:34] Dev team used Azure DevOps for backlog management, linking work items to pull requests and builds for easy tracking and communication with end users. They also suggest creating automatic task generation for consistent task patterns.

CONNECT

🌏 Amazing Apps website

MY ONLINE COURSES

Keep experimenting 🧪

-Neil

Running experiments to build Dynamics 365 and Power Platform apps

27 april 2023 | 19 min

Agile Testing for Dynamics 365 with Emma Beckett

29 mars 2023 | 40 min

Deep Dive into Dynamics 365 Marketing with Malin Martnes

21 mars 2023 | 54 min

What's Next for Customery Academy?

22 februari 2023 | 15 min

Professional Scrum and DevOps with Richard Hundhausen

15 februari 2023 | 52 min

I'm Beginning to Hate Scrum

8 februari 2023 | 11 min

Is Power Fx really low code? with Rishona Elijah

31 januari 2023 | 31 min

Power Platform Governance Possibilities with Michael Roth

4 januari 2023 | 42 min

Using Figma to design business apps with Andrew Ly

13 december 2022 | 49 min

Deploying Dynamics 365 Field Service with Magnus Sørensen

24 november 2022 | 38 min

Sprint 1 is done!

19 oktober 2022 | 15 min

Estimating Requirements for Your Microsoft Business App

27 september 2022 | 17 min

Using Story Points to Estimate Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Apps

14 september 2022 | 12 min

Why Estimate Business Apps At All?

25 augusti 2022 | 20 min

Advanced Estimating Q&A

15 augusti 2022 | 13 min

EY's PowerPost reduces lead times by 95%

12 augusti 2022 | 23 min

#125. In this episode of Amazing Applications, Emil Hovgaard and Sheelan Bhana of EY Nordic Tech Hub share the story behind EY's PowerPost application and how it has made the General Ledger posting process easier and faster for the EY organization.

Emil’s background and his role at the EY organization
Sheelan’s background and his role at the EY organization
Emil’s favorite Microsoft application
Sheelan’s favorite Microsoft application
What Emil did during his time in the EY strategy team in Australia
The internal purpose of the EY organization
The business challenge that Emil’s team had to solve that led to the creation of the PowerPost application
The approach that Emil and his team took in building the PowerPost application
Sheelan talks about connecting to SAP from a Power Platform application and the challenges that came with that
What the PowerPost project team looked like
Emil’s definition of a Fusion team
Sheelan’s experience working with Fusion developers
What drove members of the EY Global Finance and ERP teams to support the creation of the PowerPost application?
How Sheelan and the team gathered requirements
The tools that Sheelan and the team used in building the PowerPost application
The testing approach that Sheelan and the team used
How long did the PowerPost project take?
The challenges that Sheelan and the team faced during the course of the PowerPost project
How did Emil and his team approach user interface design?
How Nordic Tech Hub is responding to the possibility of users demanding more from Microsoft business applications
The results that EY managed to achieve using the PowerPost application
What’s next for Nordic Tech Hub?

Resources

EY helps enable entry at source for a global finance process with Power Platform, reducing lead times by 95 percent on Microsoft Customer Stories.
Emil Hovegaard on LinkedIn
Sheelan Bhana on LinkedIn

CONNECT

🌏 Amazing Apps website

MY ONLINE COURSES

Keep experimenting 🧪

-Neil

Documenting Power Platform Applications

29 juli 2022 | 11 min

Sprint Goals for Microsoft Business Apps

21 juli 2022 | 13 min

Can You Build Power Apps Without a Product Owner?

4 juli 2022 | 8 min

Power Platform governance at a global scale with Rene Modery

17 juni 2022 | 37 min

Defining Requirements for Complex Power Apps with Hamish Sheild

7 juni 2022 | 34 min

Is Pre-Sales the Key to Power Platform Success? with Craig McGeough

29 maj 2022 | 44 min

Power Pages and Beyond! with Ulrikke Akerbæk

19 maj 2022 | 23 min

Answer These Five Questions Before You Build Anything with Chike Eduputa

12 maj 2022 | 24 min

Six challenges of enterprise Dynamics 365 projects with Andrew Bibby and Dani Kahil

3 maj 2022 | 49 min

#116. Dani Kahil interviews Andrew Bibby about a pivotal, multi-year Dynamics 365 business transformation project in financial services.

Dani Kahil and Andrew Bibby are both Microsoft Business Applications MVPs. Dani is an independent consultant and online trainer specialising in requirements analysis and solution envisioning. Andrew Bibby is a founder of Proximo 3, a Microsoft training and advisory partner based in the UK.

Dani and Andrew discuss:

How Andrew's client engaged him as an advisor to help the customer and their Microsoft partner organisations work effectively together.
They started with a proof of concept to evaluate the Dynamics 365 platform and their agile way of working.
The customer had an application landscape including Dynamics 365, Azure, and on-premise systems.
How a single productivity business goal supported the project's business case.
Grappling with an agile approach and ultimately settling on a hybrid approach that involved lots of upfront requirements analysis and design (and the affects of this).
The importance of both the product owner and the scrum master in an agile team.
Using Azure DevOps to track requirements and realised the value in requirements traceability all the way from inception through to production releases.
Configuring Azure DevOps with a custom work item template to make it easier to capture requirements.
Challenges ensuring user stories were sufficiently detailed so that developers could understand them and how the team experience and tackled the challenge of requirements changing (or being clarified) mid sprint.
The value that estimation techniques, like planning poker, can have on helping developers understand the requirements.
Difficulties co-ordinating and communicating changes across multiple work streams so that everyone understands changes to processes, requirements, data models or APIS that might affect their work.
How solution architects can play a role in communicating changes across work streams.
Andrew's growing enthusiasm for change management, Prosci training and certification, and the positive impact that professional change management has on business application adoption.

RESOURCES

Dani Kahil on LinkedIn
Dani Kahil's blog
Dani Kahil's Functional Consulting online training course - Requirements analysis for a successful project delivery for Dynamics 365 or the Power Platform
Andrew Bibby on LinkedIn
Andrew Bibby on Twitter
Proximo 3 website
Prosci change management training

CONNECT

🌏 Amazing Apps website

MY ONLINE COURSES

Keep experimenting 🧪

-Neil

Application Eggs and Change Chickens with Angeliki Patsiavou

25 april 2022 | 23 min

Personalise Your Customer Experience with Dynamics 365 with Guro Faller and Tricia Sinclair

11 april 2022 | 22 min

From the Basement to the Cloud with Vivian Voss

4 april 2022 | 24 min

Power Platform at the Heart of Scotland’s New Recycling Scheme

28 mars 2022 | 38 min

#112. Dani Kahil interviews Paddy Byrne about the Power Platform's role in enabling Scotland's new recycling scheme for single-use drinking containers.

Scots people are famous for being careful with their money so I imagine any program to pay them for recycling containers was always going to be a big hit.

Learn about Paddy's Power Platform team:

Meeting public-sector's accessibility and security requirements with a custom web portal rather than Power Apps Portals.
Internal project team of a functional consultants, project manager/scrum master, and business analyst; and a client project team with an architect and testers.
Challenges of using Scrum for the first time for two teams.
How do you gather requirements for a brand new application with no users or processes?
Dealing with the customer's hands-off product owner.
Working to a fixed-date release determined by government legislation.
Handling requirements written by people that don't have a lot of experience working with Power Platform applications.
Using Miro to help refine the user stories and provide developers with visual understanding.
Structuring requirements into epics, user stories and tasks in ad-hoc backlog refinement workshops.
Testing within the sprint and releasing to a test environment for the internal portal development team to build on.
Resolving schema changes during the development and managing the downstream impact on the portal developers.
Fixing bugs in the application as they arrive in the product backlog.
Creating FastTrack solution blueprints -- is it a good idea for small projects?
Value of setting expectations early and building a high performing team as soon as possible using Tuckman's forming-storming-norming-performing model of team development.
Transparency and industry expertise of a passionate product owner.

Resources

Dani Kahil on LinkedIn
Dani Kahil's blog
Dani Kahil's Functional Consulting online training course - Requirements analysis for a successful project delivery for Dynamics 365 or the Power Platform
Paddy Byrne on LinkedIn
Paddy Byrne on Twitter
Paddy Byrne's blog
Virtual Power Group Scotland website

CONNECT

🌏 Amazing Apps website

MY ONLINE COURSES

Keep experimenting 🧪

-Neil

Start Here: How to Build Amazing Apps

15 mars 2022 | 37 min

Testing Heaven: When Should We Test Power Platform Apps?

10 februari 2022 | 13 min

Enterprise CRM with scaled Scrum at RACQ

24 januari 2022 | 50 min

Behind the Scenes of Amazing Apps

4 januari 2022 | 18 min

108. If you're considering starting a Dynamics 365 or Power Platform podcast in 2022, or just wonder what's involved in producing a podcast episode, join me for a behind the scenes look at my four step episode production process.

If you have any questions about starting a business apps podcast, I'd love to do my best to help. Email me at [email protected].

Resources

Some of these resources include affiliate links that could result in a commission paid to me so that I can blow off my consulting engagements and just podcast all day.

Preparation

Amazing Apps Ideas - my crowd-sourced content calendar for podcasts and videos

Calendly - the scheduling service I use to schedule guest interviews

Amazing Apps Guest - my resource page for potential guests on the Amazing Apps podcast

GlideGear telepromter - I upgraded from a Parrot teleprompter to GlideGear to hold a tablet

PromptSmart Pro - voice-activated teleprompter software for iOS and Android

Recording

Squadcast - for recording high-quality, lossless audio and video with remote guests

Audacity - free audio recording, editing and mastering software for Mac and Windows

RØDE Procaster - studio and broadcast quality, dynamic XLR microphone

RØDE PSA1 - study microphone boom arm that I also used for a video camera

RØDECaster Pro - audio production studio for remote and local podcast recording and mixing

RØDE Lav+ - lavalier/lapel mic that I use when recording audio for video

RØDE Wireless Go - wireless microphone system I use when recording audio for video

Production

Descript - all-in-one transcription, audio and video editing, mixing and mastering software

Auphonic - automatic audio mastering service

Buzzsprout - amazing podcast host for Amazing Applications

Podpage - amazing website host for Amazing Applications

Recommended resources for learning more about podcasting

How to start a podcast in 2022 - Pat Flynn on YouTube

Power Up Podcasting - online course by Pat Flynn at SmartPassiveIncome

Best free podcast courses for 2022 - blog post by Buzzsprout

Best podcast set ups for every budget - blog post by

CONNECT

🌏 Amazing Apps website

MY ONLINE COURSES

Keep experimenting 🧪

-Neil

Blended Teams: Customer and Partner Co-development

23 december 2021 | 16 min

Product Backlog Refinement: Who's Involved? (And Why!)

7 december 2021 | 15 min

How Did You Get Scrum Master Training?

29 november 2021 | 11 min

Should You Assign Stories to Developers in Sprint Planning?

19 november 2021 | 10 min

Microsoft FastTrack Success by Design with Seth Kircher

18 oktober 2021 | 44 min

"OMG, I love your new system. It's so easy to use!" with Bruce Sithole, 365 Mechanix

29 september 2021 | 30 min

Business Transformation with Microsoft Business Apps with Lipi Sarkar

16 september 2021 | 16 min

Mastering Dynamics 365 Requirements in Azure DevOps with Dani Kahil

13 september 2021 | 24 min

How to Design Forms for Amazing User Experiences with Mary Ann Castro

3 september 2021 | 24 min

Hello, My Sweet Chatbot 🥰 with Dian Taylor

24 augusti 2021 | 19 min

5 Reasons To Avoid Analysis in Advance

16 augusti 2021 | 20 min

Advanced Product Owner Questions

26 juli 2021 | 20 min

10 Product Owner Myths on Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Projects

13 juli 2021 | 18 min

Product Goals for Power Platform and Dynamics 365

5 juli 2021 | 14 min

Who Makes the Best Scrum Product Owner?

28 juni 2021 | 25 min

Apps for Winning Awards with Gail Mercer-MacKay, Mercer MacKay Solutions

21 juni 2021 | 38 min

Power BI Deferred Design with Reza Rad, RADACAD

14 juni 2021 | 49 min

Building a CRM App for Financial Advisors with Stephen Handley, Fin365

8 juni 2021 | 44 min

A Power Apps Portal for 1 Million Users in 100 hours with Mohammed Mohsin Khalid, Imperium Dynamics

31 maj 2021 | 42 min

Adopting the Power Platform with Brendan Eger, Partners in Health

25 maj 2021 | 40 min

Power Apps for 100,000 users with Mandar Zope, Slalom Consulting

17 maj 2021 | 35 min

Agile Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations with Paul Heisterkamp

11 maj 2021 | 36 min

Are Microsoft Certifications Causing Projects to Fail? with Julie Yack and Julian Sharp

3 maj 2021 | 41 min

3 Big Lessons in Change Management with Britt Damkjaer

26 april 2021 | 41 min

Bonus: Extended Interview with Marc Schweigert

21 april 2021 | 10 min

Power Apps ALM Accelerator for Advanced Makers with Marc Schweigert, Microsoft

19 april 2021 | 56 min

Pitching Scrum to Microsoft Customers

5 april 2021 | 19 min

3 User Story Traps to Avoid with Power Platform and Dynamics 365

29 mars 2021 | 25 min

Bonus: Extended Interview with CJ Brooks, MISSION CRM

24 mars 2021 | 16 min

The Making of MISSION CRM with CJ Brooks

22 mars 2021 | 39 min

Bonus: Extended Interview with Bert Wijns, Power Accelerate

17 mars 2021 | 17 min

Automagically Building Power Apps with Bert Wijns, Power Accelerate

15 mars 2021 | 40 min

Building Power Platform Applications for a Church with Haniel Croitoru, Protiviti

8 mars 2021 | 31 min

#NoEstimates Business Applications with Vasco Duarte

1 mars 2021 | 45 min

Documenting Power Apps with Daryl LaBar and Jonas Rapp

23 februari 2021 | 39 min

Should You Design Upfront When Scaling Development?

15 februari 2021 | 13 min

Can a Scrum Team Have Just One Developer?

8 februari 2021 | 7 min

How Can We Bridge the Gap Between Business and IT?

29 januari 2021 | 8 min

Should Business Apps Teams Follow the Agile Manifesto?

20 januari 2021 | 10 min

6 Roles Every Enterprise Business Applications Project Should Have

12 januari 2021 | 15 min

How to Manage Scope Creep in an Agile Project?

28 december 2020 | 21 min

Data Migration in Agile Dynamics 365 Projects

15 december 2020 | 10 min

What Does the Scrum Guide 2020 Mean For Us?

30 november 2020 | 17 min

Scrum Master or Agile Project Manager?

23 november 2020 | 9 min

Should We Have a Standard Set of User Stories?

16 november 2020 | 7 min

How Can We Adopt Scrum for Dynamics 365 Business Central?

9 november 2020 | 7 min

How Can We Be Sure We've Captured All Requirements?

4 november 2020 | 6 min

Scrum Guide 2020 Launch Event

3 november 2020 | 7 min

Certification for Dynamics 365 Product Owners

21 oktober 2020 | 10 min

Have You Ever Fired a Client?

28 september 2020 | 14 min

Dynamics 365 for Talent with Ana Inés Urrutia de Souza

14 september 2020 | 22 min

#57. Join me with Ana Inés Urrutia de Souza, a Dynamics 365 HR consultant at FourVision and a rising star in our Power Platform community. Ana shares the story behind the amazing Dynamics 365 for Talent application her team deployed at Centria, in Lima, Peru.

Ana came from an HR administrator role and today is an HR application functional consultant at FourVision.
Ana's project team created a Dynamics 365 for Talent companion app using Power Apps to enhance the recruiting process at Centria.
HR departments and their applications are often treated as a cost to the organisation.
This is slowly changing but sometimes HR professionals could do more to improve how they are perceived.
COVID-19 has presented HR professionals with an opportunity to lead their company's culture.
It took a small team of just three people to build the Power App.
Part-way through the project, the client asked for robotic process automation (RPA) to help improve the efficiency of their HR processes.
At the end of the project, Microsoft announced that Dynamics 365 for Talent was being deprecated.
The client wasn't happy, of course, but they are able to use Talent Attract and Onboard until 2022.
The upside of Microsoft's changing product strategies is that Microsoft partners have become more flexible in their thinking and approaches.
Configuring Dynamics 365 for Talent was relatively easy. The hardest part of the project was integrating the Power App with SAP, which involved a dependency on another team.
The project's success was assisted by Ana's HR career background which helped her empathise with her stakeholders.
There was very open and transparent communication between the project team and its stakeholders that built trust.
A third factor that contributed to the app's success was the confidence and leadership of the HR general manager (who had been Ana's former co-worker).

Connect with Ana
LinkedIn: Ana Inés Urrutia de Souza
Blog: AnaInesUrrutia.com
Twitter: @AnaInesUrrutia

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

Dynamics Con 2020 with Molly Fuschel

2 september 2020 | 31 min

Estimating How Much and How Long

24 augusti 2020 | 23 min

Lives Lived Well with Dani Kahil

30 juli 2020 | 42 min

Estimating Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Applications

14 juli 2020 | 29 min

15 Industry Leaders Share Their Business Apps Career Advice

18 juni 2020 | 76 min

Amazing Apps Show Trailer

12 juni 2020 | 4 min

Dynamics 365 for Recruitment Industry with Chris Kendrick, Mercury xRM

1 juni 2020 | 37 min

Agile Architects with Gus Gonzalez and Joel Lindstrom

17 maj 2020 | 69 min

Prototyping Power Apps with Clément Olivier

4 maj 2020 | 27 min

When to Use Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps

17 april 2020 | 12 min

Fixing Your Scrum with Ryan Ripley

27 mars 2020 | 53 min

Live Inside My Daily Scrum

23 mars 2020 | 26 min

Agile is Dead

9 februari 2020 | 11 min

CRM Success at Orbis Investments with EY Kalman

21 januari 2020 | 48 min

All Your Scrum Team Questions Answered

5 december 2019 | 22 min

Managing Requirements in Azure DevOps with Tricia Sinclair

7 november 2019 | 45 min

Estimating Bugs in Scrum

27 oktober 2019 | 9 min

Definition of Next

10 oktober 2019 | 12 min

Agile Foundations Course Launch

3 oktober 2019 | 5 min

Repeatable Dynamics 365 Business Central with Steve Brooks, Bam Boom Cloud

31 augusti 2019 | 34 min

Agile Field Service at Monadelphous with David Conti, Velrada

19 augusti 2019 | 31 min

Dynamics 365 Turnaround at Eagle Housing with Mohamed Mostafa, iPropertyCloud

5 augusti 2019 | 45 min

#35. Mohamed Mostafa is the Solutions Director at TechLabs London, best known for iPropertyCloud, a suite of business applications for property companies.

In this episode, Mohamed joins me to discuss the successful implementation of iPropertyCloud at Eagle Housing*. Eagle Housing is a rapidly-growing social housing organisation that manages 11,000 properties across the UK.

Eagle Housing was referred to TechLabs London by another customer when their original Dynamics 365 project wasn’t delivering the expected results.

Eagle Housing went live in production eight weeks after re-starting their project with TechLabs London! Then they used an agile approach to iteratively and incrementally enhance the system every four weeks based on feedback from the users.

Using an industry solution, like iPropertyCloud, TechLabs London is able to deliver most of the features that users need in that initial release. Starting with an industry solution was a critical factor in the project’s success.

They had the right people from the customer’s organisation on the project team including business analysts to provide and prioritise the requirements, and users available to test the application and provide their feedback.

Although Eagle Housing’s board of directors was split in their support for the Dynamics 365 project, because of the earlier project, Mohammed was able to persuade them to give his team a couple of months to produce results.

Not only has TechLabs London found a successful way of delivering projects remotely, they even have examples of customers they have never met, evaluating and acquiring iPropertyCloud and going live in production.

They had to keep a can-do attitude when faced with challenges integrating Dynamics 365 with an existing system managed by another vendor on behalf of Eagle Housing.

Mohamed invited the Microsoft team to meet Eagle Housing several times throughout the project. You don’t need to be an enterprise customer these days. Microsoft loves to hear from and meet any successful customer. And these success stories are good news for all Microsoft partners too (which is one of the reasons I’m producing this podcast series).

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

Dynamics 365 for Financial Services Transformation with Andrew Bibby

24 juli 2019 | 55 min

Migrating to Dynamics 365 Business Central with Johan Adenmark and Carolina Edvinsson

13 juli 2019 | 32 min

How Much Have You Customised Dynamics 365?

3 juli 2019 | 14 min

Power Apps Portals Disaster (Even with Scrum!)

13 juni 2019 | 22 min

Emergent Design

30 maj 2019 | 13 min

Done! With the Power Apps Solution Checker

16 maj 2019 | 10 min

Shawn, Stop Estimating Effort in Days! with Shawn Tabor

6 maj 2019 | 10 min

Pitching Scrum to Microsoft Customers

24 april 2019 | 11 min

Timeline of a 2-week Sprint

22 april 2019 | 24 min

#26. Dan Barber, from the Customery Crew, wanted to know what it would be like inside some of Neil’s scrum events. In Scrum Dynamics 26, Neil walks Dan through one of his recent ten-day sprints day-by-day from sprint planning on Monday morning to the sprint review two weeks later. Here’s how it went…

Day One. Sprint planning is at 3pm for two hours on Monday afternoon. We finalise the sprint goal, determine and determine the sprint backlog. On Tuesday morning, we start work on any stories carried over from the previous sprint, one-point stories and spikes. The Dynamics 365 squads hold their daily scrums at 9.15am and 9.30am. On Tuesday morning there’s a showcase for our business stakeholders. Tuesday afternoon is our retrospective for the previous sprint.

Day Two. We have a technical design session on Wednesday morning to finalise the technical designs for the more complex stories. In the afternoon the analysts run a storytime workshop to elaborate and estimate stories for a future sprint.

Day Three. The first product owner review session is on Thursday afternoon. It’s an opportunity for the tester to demonstrate any completed features for the product owner’s acceptance (fingers crossed).

Day Four. Applause in Friday’s daily scrum as the first few accepted stories are moved to done. We sometimes hold back on completing all the definition of done activities until the end of the sprint so that developers can get working on another story and let the testers start testing as early as possible.

Day Five. Monday doesn’t have any scrum events so it’s a solid development day. I’d love to say we’re halfway through the sprint backlog when we’re halfway through the sprint, but we’re often still playing catch up.

Day Six. On Tuesday morning, some of the developers have finished all the stories they forecast they would complete. They help other developers complete their stories, work on spikes, chores and bugs. We can bring stories in from the product backlog, but only if the development team agrees that we can get the story developed and tested before the end of the sprint.

Day Seven. Our aim is to be dev complete on all story cards by the end of the day on Wednesday so that our testers have sufficient time to test all our stories and have them accepted by the end of the sprint.

Day Eight. We’re helping the testers by responding to feedback. We don’t track bugs reported by the testers or product owner. Instead, we just fix them on the spot. Unless they are low priority and we don’t want to fix them in this sprint, or they were reported by someone outside the scrum team. If there aren’t any bugs, then we’re finishing definition of done activities and working on spikes and chores. We’re helping our devops engineer automate all our deployment tasks. We don’t want to have any manual deployment steps. So we automate everything using Atlassian Bamboo and Octopus Deploy. We also have another storytime workshop to elaborate and esitmate stories for a future sprint on Thursday afternoon.

Day Nine. Thank goodness it’s Friday. There aren’t any sprint events today. We might run an ad-hoc design workshop on Friday morning to

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Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

Reading Your Answers at the Daily Scrum

22 april 2019 | 8 min

Scrum Role Antipatterns

22 april 2019 | 30 min

#24. Neil covers his top 10 antipatterns for Scrum roles in Dynamics 365 projects.

An antipattern looks like a good idea to a situation you were facing but wasn’t the best option when you look back on it. Antipatterns are traps that we want to help others avoid.

Here are Neil's top ten antipatterns for Scrum roles:

Uncommitted product owner. If your senior project stakeholder is too senior, they usually won’t have the availability required to be a committed product owner. Find someone in the next level of the organisation and backfill their job so they can be a full-time product owner for your Dynamics 365 project.
Committee of product owners. This antipattern often occurs when we’re implementing Microsoft Business Applications across several divisions. Don’t settle for a committee of product owners from the different divisions. Find one single product owner they can all trust. Otherwise you’ll get pulled in lots of directions.
Overdriving product owner. Often product owners with a background in sales leadership use motivation techniques, such as setting stretch targets, that often don’t work with developers. Use their enthusiasm, vision and communications skills, but watch out for them becoming a backlog troll.
Learn-as-you-go product owner. Most product owners in a Dynamics 365 project have never been a product owner before might never have worked on a project before. For the sake of your team, your users and your organisation you deserve product owner training, to read widely about product ownership and to work closely with your scrum master for coaching on the product owner responsibilities.
Part-time scrum master. World-class sports teams don’t expect one of the players to coach the team. Great scrum masters might be able to coach two, possibly even three teams, but it’s a full-time role that shouldn’t be handed to one of your developers.
Combined product owner and scrum master. The goals of the product owner and scrum master can occasional come into conflict. If the product owner wants to push the team hard to meet a release deadline but the scrum master wants to preserve a sustainable pace. Keep the roles separate to balance that natural tension and avoid a conflict of interest.
Scrum monster. Every scrum master is familiar with the rules in the Scrum guide. And they’re familiar with agile software development technical practices. Great scrum masters know when to bend the rules, and how to make the most of situations when your team can’t follow the rules.
Rookie scrum master. It can be hard for a lot of project managers to transition into the scrum master role. It requires a mindset sift into an agile way of thinking, and Neil recommends that project managers spend a year working in a scrum team before trying to coach the team as a scrum master.
Sharing developers between projects. Sharing a developer between projects can appear to maximise their productivity, but it can drag down the throughput of the teams relying on that developer. If you can’t dedicate a developer to your Dynamics 365 project, then make mutually agreed commitments about when they will be available so that you can determine your capacit

CONNECT
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MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

Hiring a Coach for Your Dynamics 365 Scrum Team

22 april 2019 | 37 min

#23. Neil and Dermot discuss when Microsoft Dynamics customers and partners should consider hiring a scrum master or agile coach for their project.

What is an agile coach and how is this role different from a scrum master?

A scrum master is a coach for the development team, the product owner and the organisation. Dermot reckons a scrum master can coach up to three teams.

An agile coach focuses on coaching the organisation. The growth and agile mindset of the leadership team and the organisation’s digital transformation. An agile coach is familiar with many agile frameworks and tools in addition to Scrum. Some agile coaches also coach scrum masters as well as leadership teams. Dermot’s coaching both!

Should Microsoft customers hire an independent scrum master or rely on their Microsoft partner to provide a scrum master for their Dynamics 365 project?

Dermot’s advice is that smaller customers embarking on a single project should engage a Microsoft partner with a good scrum master, but if the Dynamics project is part of a broader digital transformation programme then an independent agile coach is a good investment.

Should Microsoft customers hire an independent product owner?

After a little consideration, Neil begins to agree with Dermot that an independent product owner can when the person is trusted by the client, knows the organisation well, and is given some time to ‘bed in’ to the project.

Can Microsoft partners send their project managers to a Scrum training course and ask them to become a scrum masters on their next project?

It’s a loaded question for Dermot! It’s tough for project managers to become scrum masters on their first Scrum project. The project manager won’t have a mentor to help them adopt Scrum. This will leave the project manager, the scrum team and the client short-changed.

Neil partnered with another Microsoft partner organisation, CIBER UK, on his first Scrum project and they provided an experienced scrum master, Paul Fox, to coach the team through their first scrum project. Investing in outside help through your first Scrum project was a worthwhile idea.

Having the get-up-and-go to just try Scrum without any coaching is risky but it can work. Nick Doelman is an example of a Dynamics 365 expert whose teams adopted Scrum without hiring an experienced scrum master to coach them through their first Scrum projects.

What are the characteristics you should look for when hiring an agile coach or scrum master?

Dermot asks scrum masters situational questions about examples of how to handle difficult team members, when they’ve displayed servant leadership, how they’ve helped product owners prioritise their epics, what metrics they track and what they do with those metrics.

He’d ask agile coaches what’s the difference between an agile coach and a scrum master. What examples do they have of leading digital transformation programmes, how they have uplifted the capabilities of agile teams, and what agile frameworks they are familiar with and how they’ve leveraged them. And what other coaches do they follow and how do they keep their own experience up-to-date?

Neil has seen scrum master candidates asked to facilitate a retrospective without e

CONNECT
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MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

Scrum Event Antipatterns

8 april 2019 | 26 min

Azure DevOps with Mark Christie

5 april 2019 | 34 min

#21. Mark Christie, who specialises in Dynamics 365 for Field Service at eBECS, uses Azure DevOps (formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services). He’s from Perth, the ancient capital of Scotland. On 25 January he’ll be celebrating Burns Night where the haggis is introduced to the table with bagpipes. Dynamics 365 Saturday Scotland runs on Friday 25 and Saturday 26 January, and its speakers will also be piped into the room.

Azure DevOps combines planning tools such as backlogs and boards, with development tools like source control and testing with operations features to help you compile and deploy your applications.

Neil is enjoying the forecasting feature of Azure DevOps which helps you see how long a project might take given a set of product backlog items and estimated team velocity.

Mark enjoys building Azure DevOps dashboards and that although it’s a large suite, users can use a single app, like testing, within Azure DevOps without knowing the other parts of it.

Azure DevOps is free for small project teams up to five users. Paid plans start at US$30 per month for 10 users to $750 per month for 100 users. Visual Studio subscribers are free. Microsoft partners can choose whether to provide their own instance of Azure DevOps and invite their customers to join, or whether to join their customer’s instance of Azure DevOps.

When they recorded this episode, neither Mark nor Neil knew there was an on-premise option of Azure DevOps available. There is. It’s called Azure DevOps Server 2019 and it’s the successor to Team Foundation Server.

Mark outlines how he manages his product back in Azure DevOps. Mark uses tasks to manage the work required to complete user stories in his backlog whereas Neil doesn’t.

Mark also reveals a cunning track: using hashtags to label items even more quickly than using the label feature.

Mark and Neil share the different statuses they use to track how items move across their Scrum boards.

Mark’s co-worker, Richard Harding, gets credit for how Mark’s team are using the Azure DevOps wiki feature to help stakeholders learn how to use Dynamics 365’s features.

Finally, if you think Scotsmen are famous for being frugal with their money, Mark will pay you £1.25 for a $1 note.

Mark’s blog: TheMarkChristie.co.uk

Mark’s LinkedIn profile: Mark Christie

Mark’s Twitter page: TheMarkChristie

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

Scrum in the Public Sector with Seth Bacon

5 april 2019 | 34 min

Optimising Scrum Teams

4 april 2019 | 43 min

#19. We’re on a mission to ensure every Microsoft customer and partner successfully implements Dynamics 365 using the Scrum framework.

Do you have a question for the Scrum Dynamics podcast? Visit Customery.com and click on the Send Voicemail button to have your question feature on the show.

Dermot and Neil discuss how to optimise Scrum teams on a Dynamics 365 project.

Todd Mercer, from MD Financial Management in Ottawa Canada, asks “What to do motivate a team to operate at peak capacity for a long period of time? For enterprises that can’t afford a dedicated product owner or scrum master, what roles do you see pair up on a part-time basis?”

Dermot and Neil discuss sharing the product owner, scrum master and developer roles. They also share our experience of keeping scrum teams interested and having fun on long-running projects by keeping things fun, letting them experiment, and get more involved in refining the backlog.

Using the Dedicated-Time Model or Dedicated-Team Model (Scrum Field Guide by Mitch Lacey) for managing legacy systems while deploying Dynamics 365.

Using a decision log to document design shifts from sprint to sprint in order to explain scope changes to your project sponsor and ask for the additional budget if you need it. Scope changes belong to the product owner, rather than the development team.

Having T-shaped skills in developers and cross-functional skills in a development team to avoid resource constraints. Encouraging developers to broaden their skills and knowledge to improve the team’s overall velocity.

Avoiding customisation conflicts by using a magic wand to indicate that you’re working on a commonly-used solution component. Using digital tools such as Skype or Teams and frequent conversations to keep each other up-to-date on what we’re doing.

Working on very small scrum teams and large teams. Neil recounts his experience working as a one-person development team, and Dermot and Neil worked on a team with 18 people. The Scrum Guide says development teams should have 3 to 9 people, so are Dermot and Neil crazy?

Should you split large teams into component teams and feature teams? Dermot is a fan of feature teams because they have the cross-functional skills to release an increment to production. Component teams can’t release their work into production, but Neil has seen a component team used successfully for systems integration work.

How do you manage dependencies on resources outside your scrum team? When Dermot needs firewall changes performed by the networks team he lines up the request weeks in advance to ensure there are no blockers during his sprint when the firewall changes are needed. Neil has two of the infrastructure team embedded in his programme to help raise, route and escalate dependent requests outside of my scrum teams.

Can a Dynamics team work with multiple product owners? Neil reckons they can when there is a product owner for each feature team in a scaled scrum project, but not when there is a committee of product owners. Dermot shares his experience of area and chief product owners.