156 avsnitt • Längd: 25 min • Månadsvis
Amazing Apps is for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform builders who want to use the Scrum framework to build amazing business apps that everyone will love. The podcast is hosted by Microsoft MVP, Neil Benson, and produced by Customery.[Dynamics365, D365, Power Apps, PowerApps, Power Pages, Power Apps Portals, Power Automate, Flow, Power Virtual Agents, PVA, PowerBI]
The podcast Amazing Apps – learn how to build agile Dynamics 365 and Power Platform business apps using Scrum is created by Neil Benson. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
#156. Neil Benson dives into the essentials of continuously improving Scrum practices in this episode of the Amazing Apps podcast.
Drawing on the book "Mastering Professional Scrum" by Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl, Neil outlines critical areas for team success, such as creating valuable products and understanding organizational influences. He emphasizes five core capabilities needed for continuous improvement: teaching, facilitation, coaching, technical excellence, and servant leadership.
Neil discusses the continuous improvement process recommended by Ockerman and Reindl, which includes self-assessment questionnaires and root cause analysis to address team issues. He highlights the importance of the Scrum pillars—transparency, inspection, and adaptation—and shows how sprint events like planning and review foster a culture of empiricism, allowing teams to run experiments and refine their practices based on real-world outcomes.
Celebrating the traits of high-performing scrum teams, Neil underscores the significance of being cross-functional, self-managing, and collaborative. He touches upon practices that bolster collaboration within these teams, such as backlog refinement and pair programming, while also stressing the freedom scrum teams have to define their workflows within Scrum guidelines.
Neil also addresses common challenges, such as the absence of key roles during refinement sessions, and recommends using the Five Whys technique to tackle root causes. He provides practical tips like conducting multiple short refinement sessions to prevent release delays.
With actionable insights and a call to action to use the self-assessment questionnaire from the book, this episode is a goldmine for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 teams looking to elevate their Scrum practices. Tune in to learn practical strategies for continuous improvement and master the art of agile with your team.
Don't miss out—subscribe to the Amazing Apps podcast to stay updated on more insightful episodes in the Mastering Professional Scrum series.
RESOURCES
#155. In this episode of Amazing Apps, host Neil Benson explores the importance of rethinking our approach to building business applications. Join us as we delve into the benefits of questioning our assumptions and adapting to new information in the dynamic landscape of app development.
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
RESOURCES
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
#154. Neil Benson takes us on a journey of learning through experimentation. Starting with the historical origins of smallpox inoculation, Neil discusses the importance of conducting experiments to drive innovation and problem-solving.
Sharing personal experiences from his biochemistry studies to his current work in building applications with Power Platform and Dynamics 365, Neil emphasizes the value of agile software development and the significance of learning through short bursts of experimentation.
He provides insights into real-world experiments with AI Builder and form processing models, highlighting the impact of these experiments on improving business processes. Neil also shares his experimentation with AI features in his own content creation and business operations, encouraging listeners to embrace the mindset of a scientist and continue experimenting.
So, tune in to explore the power of learning through experiments and discover how it can accelerate your own journey in building amazing apps.
Free Workshop: 3 Secrets to Building Business Apps with Scrum
Join this free interactive workshop to discover the three secrets to successfully using Scrum to build agile apps so you can deliver projects faster, under budget, have more fun, and get promoted.
https://customery.com/3secrets
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
#153. Neil Benson is joined by Keith Atherton, a proper pro developer. Keith shares his journey from developing custom apps using .NET, C# and SQL Server to embracing and mastering the development of enterprise business applications using the Power Platform.
Keith Atherton
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft 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
#152. Host Neil Benson is joined by the talented Dani Kahil for an insightful discussion on managing backlogs and enhancing user stories in Azure DevOps and Jira. Neil shares his experiences with Jira, highlighting some configuration challenges, while Dani expresses a strong preference for Azure DevOps.
They dive into the hierarchy of backlog items, including epics, features, user stories, and tasks, and explore different approaches to tracking progress on a Kanban board. Throughout their conversation, Neil and Dani discuss the importance of refining user stories, enriching them with acceptance criteria, and prioritising features based on their value to the team or users. They also touch on the significance of releasing value quickly and iterating on functionality. Join us for an engaging conversation packed with practical insights and tips for efficient backlog management. Let's get started!
Dani Kahil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danikahil/
Dani's blog: https://danikahil.com
Kahil Consulting: https://kahilconsulting.com/
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft 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
#151. Amazing Apps host, Neil Benson, dives into a case study from one of his team's own projects: "Member Super", a financial services organisation in Australia. With over a million members, they needed a CRM application that could handle their complex stakeholder relationships and provide exceptional service to their customers.
Member Super's existing CRM app was limiting their capabilities and hindering their goal of achieving a single view of their customers. So, they made the decision to take control and build their own CRM application. Superware partnered with them to make it happen, and the results were nothing short of AMAZING!
RESOURCES
Superware.ai website: https://superware.ai
Superware on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/superware-ai
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
#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
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
#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
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#148. Get ready for another captivating episode of Amazing Apps! In this episode, Neil Benson engages Shawn Tabor, Director of Consulting Services at Hitachi Solutions, in an insightful conversation about the dynamic realm of Microsoft Business Applications and its role in the manufacturing and service industries. Explore Hitachi's product landscape, investment strategies, and the art of identifying patterns to create accelerators for efficient project estimations. Discover Shawn's podcasting journey, collection hobbies, and upcoming conference plans.
Timestamps
05:40 Improving customer experience for manufacturers
07:36 The power of strategic planning
09:56 The challenge of implementing Microsoft ecosystem
10:59 Microsoft investment strategies
14:06 Simplifying field service applications
15:07 Streamlining field service
20:59 Significant implementations across manufacturing, services, and healthcare
21:37 Integration challenges in the field service business
23:34 Power Platform innovations
24:55 Agile methodology
RESOURCES
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
#147. When should you use Power Platform pipelines and when should you use Azure DevOps pipelines to deploy your Power Platform or Dynamics 365 applications? That's the question that Benedikt Bergmann answers in this episode of Amazing Apps.
Benedikt is a Power Platform consultant known for his expertise in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). Neil and Benedikt delve into the world of ALM, discussing its importance for small and enterprise teams alike. From tools and environments to testing and components outside of solutions. Whether you're a low code app builder or part of a large development team, this episode has something for everyone. Join us as we explore the intricacies of ALM and discover how to deploy and maintain applications in a secure, efficient, and repeatable manner.
Register for Benedikt's ALM Training Course
Resources
Overview of Power Platform pipelines
More power with pipelines in Power Platform
Power Platform server on Discord
Connect with Benedikt
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#146. In this episode, we're thrilled to have Martin Hinshelwood from naked Agility join host, Neil Benson. Martin shares his perspectives on improving the success of agile engagements through the role of a consulting product owner, and why you should build your own business applications rather than buy Dynamics 365 if you're looking for competitive advantage. Hit the play button and dive into this insightful conversation between Neil and Martin!
Timestamps
02:46 The importance of unique capabilities in a competitive market
06:09 The power of vertical integration
11:58 Outsourcing core business practices
16:37 Risks and rewards in business
21:02 The incompetence of business
31:38 The role of a consulting product owner
33:44 The role of a scrum master in the professional services world
36:56 Using APIs to drive innovation
RESOURCES
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
#145. We're back with another incredible episode of Amazing Apps, and this time we have an amazing guest on board. Neil Benson is joined by the Low Code Lead & Platform Evangelist at ANS Group, Chris Huntingford. Chris spills the beans on citizen developers, he talks about the concept of ecosystem enablement, the potential of low code platforms, the importance of enabling everyone to build apps and flows, hackathons, and more. Hit the play button and dive into this insightful conversation between Neil and Chris!
TIMESTAMPS
00:03:39 The importance of citizen developers
00:07:24 The power of fusion teams
00:09:09 Building skills with hands-on experience
00:13:30 All about hackathons
00:16:38 The importance of ecosystem enablements
00:18:16 The importance of people in digital transformation
00:20:31 Customer shift in app development
00:22:09 The future of Dynamics and Power Platform
00:26:07 What it’s like to work for Microsoft or a partner
00:32:13 The impact of timing on conference attendance
00:34:00 Tips for effective learning and building solutions with Dataverse
RESOURCES
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
#144. Neil Benson is joined by Matthew Venamore, a scrum master with extensive experience coaching Dynamics 365 teams. Matthew shares valuable insights into the challenges faced by new scrum masters when joining existing teams and emphasizes the importance of empowering the team. He advises taking a standoffish stance initially, observing the team and their work before making any changes or adding value.
Matthew shares his personal journey, starting as a software delivery manager and eventually becoming a scrum master. He highlights the importance of coaching and guiding a team towards self-management and offers insights into handling various challenges, such as developers working on product backlog items that are not ready. He discusses the benefits and potential drawbacks of having a definition of done and a definition of ready, emphasizing the need for flexibility and open discussions within the team.
Tune in to this enlightening episode of Amazing Apps podcast as Matthew Venamore provides valuable insights and practical advice for both new and experienced scrum masters, shedding light on the importance of empowerment, simplicity, and continuous improvement within agile teams.
Matthew Venamore
Matthew Venamore on LinkedIn
Resources
Amazing Apps 45: Live inside my Daily Scrum
Scrum Guide
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
#143. On this episode of Amazing Apps, we discuss resourcing agile teams using the Scrum framework. Neil Benson talks about who we should have on our teams as product owner, developers and scrum master. Should Microsoft partners offer to provide a consultant for every role on the team? Listen in to find out.
Timestamps
(02:04) Product owner maximizes value, sets goals.
(03:02) Product owner orders backlog, ensures focus.
(07:52) From business analyst to product owner.
(09:32) Ideal product owners.
(14:07) External stakeholders.
(16:37) QA pros are devs in Scrum teams.
(21:30) Scrum master's role and boundaries in coaching.
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
#142. Neil Benson discusses the challenges of organizing a large Scrum team to maximize efficiency. He suggests rotating developers between teams and organizing teams around specific components or external systems they need to integrate with. Neil also recommends self-organizing teams and coaches teams to create their own code of conduct and establish expected behaviors. He shares his experience of organizing teams by components in the past at RACQ and why it wasn't the best approach.
Resources
Timestamps
(02:52) Large team split into component-based teams for Scrum framework.
(04:49) Organizing teams by component creates interdependencies and hinders productivity; a better approach is having a team with all the necessary skills.
(08:27) Allowing developers to form their own teams empowers and trusts them to be accountable for their work, rather than having a manager organize teams.
(11:16) Amazing Apps Retrospective: behind the scenes.
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#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
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#140. Today, it’s just me, and I’d like to discuss what EMPIRICISM means to teams building complex, enterprise Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications.
In this episode, I’ll break down what empiricism is and its importance in Scrum, provide examples of work that would benefit from an empirical approach, and share insights on how we can use empiricism to build better business apps and improve our processes, tools, and techniques.
HIGHLIGHTS
RESOURCES
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#139. Today’s guest is Emma Beckett, an experienced test professional who runs her own company, Fortitude 17, in London, UK. A professional footballer, Emma pursued a career in software testing, even though her first role in tech was in Desktop Support — hardware, not software!
As you’ll hear, Emma is a Certified ISTQB Test Consultant and trained in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM, CE, and HR. She is currently training on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Ceridian Dayforce (HCM) solutions.
In this episode, Emma shares how she got into software testing and discusses 1) professional testing, 2) how she approaches business application projects, and 3) what testing at large can bring to Dynamics applications.
HGHLIGHTS
[01:06] How Emma came to open her own testing consultancy
[09:01] Emma’s approach to professional testing
[12:48] The qualities that Emma looks for in good test professionals
[18:09] The relationship between testing and training
[20:00] Approaches to acceptance testing that have worked well for Emma
[24:25] How Emma approaches other forms of testing on projects
[29:43] How Emma deals with testing challenges
[32:28] Other solutions that Emma’s consultancy has worked on
[34:22] Emma talks about her recently launched podcast
RESOURCES
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#138. Our guest today is Malin Martnes, a Microsoft MVP and MCT who runs her own company MaCoTra AS in Oslo, Norway. As you’ll hear, Malin doesn’t have any technical background on Dynamics 365 and Power Platform but she focuses on using these systems.
In this episode, Malin talks about how she came to be a CRM consultant and set up her own consulting business.
With years of experience as a user and trainer of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, she also discusses the integration of the HR solution with Finance & Operations, tips for deploying Dynamics 365 Marketing, and the events and training sessions she helped organize.
Show Highlights
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#137. Customery Academy is the online business through which Amazing Apps host, Neil Benson, trains and coaches Microsoft customers and partners to build amazing, agile business applications.
In this episode, Neil shares a short history of Customery Academy, where it's at today, and its goals for 2023. Halfway through editing the episode, there's a surprise about just how many Customery Academy students have achieved their Professional Scrum Master certification thanks to his son's detective work.
RESOURCES
People mentioned
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
136. My guest is Richard Hundhausen, a former Microsoft MVP and Regional Director, Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer, and co-creator of the Nexus Scaled Professional Scrum Framework. As you’ll hear, Richard doesn’t have a background in Dynamics 365 or Power Platform, but he’s no stranger to developing apps on Microsoft technology.
In this episode, Richard talks about his experience working with Microsoft and how he got started with Scrum. Drawing from his over 30 years of software development experience and over 20 years of training experience, he also discusses the merits of big bang releases versus incremental releases, product thinking versus project thinking, and what’s next with Scrum.
Show Highlights
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#135. Remy is starting to hate Scrum. He thinks we should use Kanban. And get rid of Product Owners.
It's a shame, then, that Remy doesn't understand Scrum. And doesn't want to understand Scrum.
Don't be like Remy.
Resources
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
#134. Today’s guest is Rishona Elijah, a Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Trainer, who works as a Power Platform Trainer and Evangelist at Barhead Solutions in Sydney, Australia. She spends most of her time running training sessions and delivering events around Power Platform to business users to show them what they can achieve with this technology.
In this episode, Rishona shares how she got started in Business Applications, how she uses her blog to help business users, and the latest innovations with Power Virtual Agents.
Rishona also talks about whether Power Fx is really part of a low-code platform and new features from Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance that are being incorporated into Power Platform.
Show Highlights
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#133. Today’s guest is Michael Roth, a Power Platform consultant with Avanade who specializes in governance.
In this episode, Michael walks us through how he keeps business apps amazing by working on only the fun stuff, i.e., governance and licensing, and understanding how users experience tech, specifically Power Platform.
Michael also highlights the importance of governance and shares with us some of the biggest mistakes he sees organizations make when they don’t consider governance, what he would like to see Microsoft improve, and more.
Show Highlights
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
132. Today’s guest is Andrew Ly, a Microsoft Business Applications Solutioning Lead at IBM Consulting in Australia.
Andrew shares his 22 years of experience in the Microsoft space, including the type of work he does and the clients he works with.
Andrew also gives his two cents on the low-code, no-code approach and talks about the demand of in a day trainings like App-in-a-Day sessions, Figma, and Power Platform applications.
Show Highlights
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#131. Today’s guest is Magnus Gether Sørensen, a Dynamics 365 Field Service expert at Delegate in Denmark.
Magnus shares with us some of the Field Service projects he has worked on, as well as the interesting challenges that his customers have encountered using the application.
Plus, Magnus talks about what’s new and next for Field Service and gives a few tips for teams implementing the application.
Episode Highlights
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#130. Sprint 1 is a magical, wonderful, beautiful thing. Find out how my messy, unstructured and un-estimated sprint 1 unfurled on a recent project to build a Power Platform app for a mid-size Microsoft customer in financial services.
In-person conferences I didn't attend:
Upcoming online conferences I'm presenting at:
Learn how to qualify, pitch, propose and close more agile projects:
Tools we're using in sprint one:
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#129. Learn how to use story point estimation to estimate the relative size of your Dynamics 365 or Power Platform application's requirements.
You'll also learn:
This episode is the third of three episodes taken from my new course: Estimating Business Applications. You can join for free today and get access to the first three sections containing 17 video lessons and 3 quizzes to test your understanding.
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#128. My wife, Natascha, is a faster trail runner than I am. Find out why estimating trail runs in units of time leads to misaligned expectations about how long it'll take for us to run the same trail together.
You'll also learn:
This episode is the second of three episodes taken from my new course: Estimating Business Applications. You can join for free today and get access to the first three sections containing 17 video lessons and 3 quizzes to test your understanding.
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#127. Do you really have to estimate the effort of building the Dynamics 365 or Power Platform apps you've been asked to build? If you work for a Microsoft partner, you probably do -- unless you work for a customer who doesn't care how much it costs or how long it takes.
Find out how I approach estimation:
This episode is the first of three episodes taken from my new course: Estimating Business Applications. You can join for free today and get access to the first three sections containing 17 video lessons and 3 quizzes to test your understanding.
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#126. Thanks for all your questions about estimating business applications. In this episode, I tackle four tricky situations when it comes to estimating Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications.
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#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.
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#124. When you're using an agile approach, like Scrum, how and when should you document your Dynamics 365 or Power Platform applications? After all, the Agile Manifesto says, "We value working software over comprehensive documentation", right?
Before projects start, my teams document requirements in a product backlog, visualise the backlog in a user story map, and discuss the project during a solution blueprint review workshop.
During sprints, we're writing unit tests, functional test cases, describing our features in wiki pages and tracking our decisions in a decision register.
Towards the end of the project or before a production release, we'll export the wiki as an as-as-built solution design document and hand it over the axe-wielding psychopaths who will be supporting and maintaining our applications.
And, of course, we'll produce all the other documentation our product owner asks us to if she create documentation-related items and prioritises them in the product backlog.
RESOURCES
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#123. Learn how to use sprint goals to communicate to your stakeholders what your team has committed to building this sprint. If you can write your sprint goal in the subject line of the sprint review invitation to your stakeholders, and they stampede to accept your invite and beat down the door at sprint review, that's a great sprint goal.
This episode includes examples of sprint goals for Dynamics 365 and Power Apps projects and answers sprint goal questions like:
What sprint goal is your team working on? Let me know on LinkedIn.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#122. Ethan is a scrum master for a Power Platform team and his team is trying to build an app but the customer's product owner hasn't shown up yet! What should he do?
If your team's product owner is missing in action, in this episode you'll learn how to prevent this situation from happening, what to do to recover, and what could happen if you don't.
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#121. What's it like trying to manage 10 Microsoft 365 tenants with hundreds of environments, apps and citizen developers. Rene Modery, Power Platform Technical Lead shares his journey at global advertising company, WPP.
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#120. Hamish Sheild describes his five step Solution Mapping framework for using design thinking principles to define the requirements for complex Power Apps.
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#119. What's the role of pre-sales in setting up Microsoft customers and partners for successful Dynamics 365 and Power Platform projects? Today's guest is Craig McGeough, Power Platform Pre-Sales Consultant at Incremental Group.
Make sure you catch Craig's session, More than "selling the dream"! Why Pre-Sales is the key to Power Platform success, at Scottish Summit on Friday, 9 June 2022. Register for free today at ScottishSummit.com.
RESOURCES
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
#118. Ulrikke Akerbæk joins to discuss what's new with Power Pages (still called Power Apps Portals when we recorded this episode under NDA!). Discover some of the goodies Microsoft has been releasing for professional developers Power Pages and which portal template Ulrikke uses for almost every portals project.
Announcing the preview of Microsoft Power Pages on the Power Apps blog.
Ulrikke is the Low Code Platform Lead at Itera in Norway and has been a Microsoft MVP since 2021.
Ulrikke is presenting 'Portal Templates - What's new?' at Scottish Summit on Saturday 10 June 2002. Register today for Scottish Summit.
RESOURCES
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#117. Chike Eduputa challenges citizen developers (and professional developers) to ask themselves five critical questions before building their next Power Platform or Dynamics 365 app.
Chike Eduputa is a senior manager at Capgemini Invent in London where he specialises in digital strategy and transformation. He's presenting at Scottish Summit on 9 June with the topic "Build what matters: critical metrics for citizen developers".
Register today for Scottish Summit.
Chike invites us to answer five questions before embarking on a project to build a business application. Listen to the episode to find out more.
RESOURCES
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#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:
RESOURCES
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#115. Angeliki Patsiavou is on a mission to help Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform application development teams introduce professional change managers to their projects from inception instead of deferring it until near the end.
Angeliki is a senior consultant at Avanade, specialising in change management, and has a background as a change manager at HSBC and a digital marketer.
Join us as we highlight her upcoming presentation at Scottish Summit, "The chicken-egg dilemma; should product development or change management come first in CRM systems?"
RESOURCES
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#114. I'm joined by Microsoft MVPs Guro Faller and Tricia Sinclair. Guro and Tricia are presenting at Scottish Summit in Glasgow in June.
Their presentation is "Personalize Your Customer Experience with Dynamics 365". It's going to be a showcase of the art of the possible with Dynamics 365 Marketing, Customer Insights, and Omni-channel for Customer Service.
Guests
Tricia Sinclair is a customer service lead at Avanade, and she's based in London in the UK.
Guro Faller is a solution lead in the digital marketing center of excellence also at Avanade, and she's based in Oslo, in Norway.
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#113. Vivian Voss joins me to discuss her upcoming Scottish Summit session, From the Basement to the Cloud - Your Journey from CRM on-premises to Dynamics 365 CE.
Register today for Scottish Summit.
Congratulations to Yacob Shenkute from Power Platform School for achieving his Scrum.org PSM1 certification.
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#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:
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#111. Start here to learn why, when and how to use an agile approach to build Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications.
In this episode, you'll learn:
To learn more about adopting an agile approach, take my free Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Applications mini-course.
If you're ready to learn Scrum, achieve your Scrum.org PSM1 certification and learn my proven practices for applying Scrum to Microsoft Business Apps projects, join my Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course.
If you're a Microsoft partner applying Scrum to your projects and you're ready to win more agile projects, apply for my Winning Agile Projects masterclass.
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#110. My current team is stuck in Limbo. We've finished development of a Dynamics 365 application for a local government department and we're tapping our fingers waiting for acceptance testing to start.
What should agile testing look like on a Dynamics 365 or Power Platform project? I describe my agile testing Heaven, and the next best thing, Elysium. And what it's like to be stuck in Limbo.
What does testing look like on your business applications projects today?
Resources
Links to Amazon books are affiliate links for which I receive a small commission.
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#109. In this special episode, I'm interviewed by Dani Kahil about my experience delivering an enterprise CRM project at RACQ (the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland).
RACQ is a membership organisation serving two million people in Queensland with roadside assistance, insurance and banking services. In 2018, they set out to replace two legacy systems with Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Apttus and I had the pleasure of leading their Dynamics 365 delivery team.
Resources
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
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
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#107. What would you do if you ran a Microsoft partner business and your customer wanted to stack your scrum their with their developers?
This is the story of Selina who runs Gotham Heroes. Her customer, Bruce at Gotham Orphanages, wants Selina to include a couple of the orphanage's developers onto the team. But the developers don't have any experience with Dynamics 365 or Power Platform. And Selina's team are already a little behind schedule.
Would you refuse and keep control of the team so that you can keep the project on schedule? Or would you adopt your customer's developers and run a blended team to keep your customer happy?
Find out what I would do and what's holding us back from the option I recommend.
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#106. You and the Microsoft Business Apps product owner are on Teams going through the product backlog. You two are working on it together because that’s how it has always been done. And yet, when you look back at the last few sprints, you realize that is not getting the desired results.
It’s not your fault; it’s a systemic problem. The problem is that it is incredibly common for only one stakeholder -- the product owner -- to be involved in backlog refinement, but the ideal would be if all the relevant people were there!
If you've been asking yourself who else should be involved in backlog refinement, you’re in good company—most Dynamics 365 and Power Platform application teams need a little help to come up with the answer.
Resources
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
#105. Dan Foster, a senior consultant and solutions architect at CRM Dynamics, asks, "Have you found much benefit from your being a scrum master? If so, how did you get that training?"
I've taken the Scrum Alliance Certified ScrumMaster training and certification and the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master training and certification. Find out which one I recommend for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform professionals and why.
You'll also find a video accompanying this podcast episode on the Customery Academy YouTube channel.
Resources
CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil
#104. Should we assign items to a developer during sprint planning?
Some of my scrum teams building Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications assign sprint backlog items to a named developer during the sprint planning event. Is that a good idea or not?
That’s the question we’re going to be answering in this episode of Amazing Applications.
Resources
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
103. The Microsoft FastTrack Success by Design implementation guide was first published in May 2021 and has refreshed this month (October 2021) in the 2021 Wave 2 update .
What is Success by Design? Is it the latest incarnation of the Dynamics SureStep methodology or is it a new framework that all Dynamics 365 partners should consider adopting for their enterprise projects?
To find out, I'm joined by Seth Kircher. He's the Principal FastTrack Solution Architect Manager for Microsoft FastTrack's solution architects in the Americas.
We dig into the role of FastTrack, the origins and benefits of Success by Design and its future.
Resources
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
#102. Bruce Sithole's team at 265 Mechanix built a Power Portal application for a business to business lender that earned some serious kudos for his customer. Find out how in this episode of Amazing Applications.
We also cover:
Resources
Bruce Sithole on LinkedIn
365 Mechanix on LinkedIn
FastTrack Recognized Solution Architects | Microsoft Dynamics 365
FastTrack Recognized Solution Architects | Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft Traineeship Program
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
#101. DynamicsCon starts next week. Lipi Sarkar is presenting two sessions at DynamicsCon and joins me to share the highlights from her presentations as well as her book, Build a Digital Future.
Resources
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
#100. Are you looking for better ways to manage your Dynamics 365 and Power Platform requirements in Azure DevOps? Join me and Dani Kahil as we explore what it takes to master your requirements.
Resources
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
#99. We all know that good form design is important especially when we're building model-driven Power Apps and Dynamics 365 apps. But what actually makes a good form design?
Join me as Mary Ann Castro shares her secrets of effective form design from her upcoming presentation at DynamicsCon.
Resources
Mary Ann Castro on LinkedIn
Register for DynamicsCon
Special mention to Andrew Butenko, Amey Holden and Dian Taylor
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
#98. Hey everyone, Dian Taylor is here! Dian is a two-time MVP and a director of pre-sales at RSM US. She's presenting, 'Getting Started with Power Virtual Agents' at DynamicsCon on 20 September. So I invited Dian onto the Amazing Apps show to tells us all about Power Virtual Agents and give us a sneak peek into her presentation.
We discuss the summer weather in Florida and the easy life of pre-sales as well as some serious topics such as how amazing chatbots can provide an awesome customer experience while others want to make you throw your computer out the window.
Discover why Dian thinks I should start my chats with "Hello, my sweet chatbot... 🥰"
Resources
Dian Taylor on LinkedIn
D365Goddess on Twitter
D365Goddess on YouTube
D365Goddess website
Register for DynamicsCon
Register for Summit North America
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
#97. I share five reasons why I think you should avoid analysis in advance when you're building Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications.
My five top reasons:
Resources
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
#96. I continue the deeper dive into the role of the Product Owner with advanced Product Owner questions.
This episode covers:
Resources
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
#95. I continue the deeper dive into the role of the Product Owner, who is responsible for maximizing the impact of the application that the scrum team is building. And I think our product owners in Power Platform and Dynamics 365 projects have a couple of twists compared to product owners on other scrum teams.
This episode covers 10 myths about Product Owners.
Resources
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
#94. I dive deeper into getting into the right mindset to build applications. In the last episode, we looked at ten potential candidates for the product owner role in our scrum teams building Power Platform and Dynamics 365 applications. In this episode, we're going to continue the product owner topic by helping the product owner set a product goal.
This episode covers:
Resources
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
#93. I dive deeper into getting into the right mindset to build applications, including using the Scrum agile approach.
This episode covers:
Resources
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
#92. Join me with Gail Mercer-MacKay, the founder and CEO of Mercer-MacKay. They have a unique position in the Microsoft ecosystem: they help Microsoft partners clarify their marketing message and produce compelling digital content that inspires Microsoft customers to take action.
Our discussion covers:
Resources
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
#91. Join me with Reza Rad, the founder and CEO of RADACAD providing Power BI training and consultancy services to thousands of Microsoft customers and partners every year. Reza's list of achievements is pretty embarrassing. He's not just a 10 times Microsoft MVP. He's a Microsoft Regional Director. He's written over 15 books on data analytics, in addition to dozens of courses on RADACAD. He's been a speaker at dozens of industry conferences and used all of that experience to organize and host the Power BI summit for over 3000 people earlier this year, as well as the Difinity conference in New Zealand, SQL Saturday, New Zealand BI user groups, and the list goes on and on.
Our discussion covers:
Resources
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
#90. Join me with Stephen Handley,founder, CEO and chief architect at Fin365, an application development business serving financial services professionals in Australia. Fin365 was born out of need for better data management practice management platform that Stephen identified in his own financial planning business.
Our discussion covers:
Resources
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
#89. Join me with Mohammad Mohsin Khalid. And he's the founder, CEO and chief architect at Imperium Dynamics. He and his team built a Power Portal to support a million constituents booking their COVID test appointments, and they did it in less than 100 hours.
Our discussion covers:
Resources
Power Platform User Group Public Preview
Power BI User Group Public Preview
Dynamics 365 User Group Public Preview
Agile Applications virtual user group
Mohammad Mohsin Khalid on LinkedIn
Rapid Digital Transformation Partner | Imperium Dynamics
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare | Microsoft
FHIR [Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources]
Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy
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
#88. Join me with Brendan Eger, an Associate Director of Information Systems and Analytics at Partners In Health in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. Brendan's story is a fascinating journey of a small, bootstrapped team adopting the Power Platform.
Our discussion covers:
Resources
Brendan Eger on LinkedIn
Partners In Health (pih.org)
Dashboard in a Day (microsoft.com)
App in a Day Event Web page (microsoftevents.com)
Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy
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
#87. Join me with Mandar Zope, a principal consultant at Slalom Consulting from Seattle. Mandar has been busy building business applications that are being used by a hundred thousand users at a global oil and gas company.
Our discussion covers:
Resources
Mandar Zope on Linkedin
Mandar Zope #ProCodeNoCodeUnite (@mzope) on Twitter
Seattle Power Platform User Group (Seattle, WA) | Meetup
Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy
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
#86. Join me with Paul Heisterkamp, a Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations solution architect and developer at GWS in Germany.
Paul shares with us his story of a multi-country Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations project for an international automotive parts supplier.
Our discussion covers:
Resources
Paul Heisterkamp on LinkedIn
Paul Heisterkamp on twitter
GWS on LinkedIn
Microsoft FastTrack Success By Design Implementation Guide
Success By Design learning resources | Microsoft Docs
FastTrack Recognized Solution Architect program
Paul Heisterkamp Wordpress blog
Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy
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
#85. Join me with Julie Yack and Julian Sharp as we discuss my question, "Are Microsoft certifications causing projects to fail?" Julie Yack is a founder and the chief operations officer at Colorado Technology Consultants. She's an author, a trainer, a solution architect, and an MVP. Julian Sharp is the founder of Ready 365. He recently received an MVP award and is best known as a prolific Microsoft trainer. Over the past 10 or 15 or 20 years, he's trained thousands of people in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform technologies. The training and certification opportunities for everyone building Microsoft business applications have never been better.
Our discussion covers:
Resources
Julie Yack on LinkedIn
Julian Sharp on LinkedIn
Microsoft Learn
Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master
PMI Project Management Professional
Prosci Change Practitioner
LinkedIn Learning
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
#84. Join me with Britt Damkjaer, customer excellence and change management coach and the founder of bd relations in Copenhagen, Denmark as we discuss change management and business applications and other insights from her experience as a product owner and coach. I like how Britt is expanding our minds to thinking not just about our users, but also our end customers and the impact that our business applications are going to have on the customer experience, too.
Our discussion covers:
Resources
Britt Damkjaer on LinkedIn
IT'S OUR CUSTOMER book page on Britt's website with a preview of the book
Register for Achieve Successful CRM webinar
Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy
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
#83. Bonus extended interview with Marc Schweigert, principal program manager on the Power Customer Advisory Team at Microsoft as we talk about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) approaches suited to novices and citizen developers through to professional developers.
In this bonus extended interview, I ask Marc 10 rapid-fire "would you rather" questions:
Resources
Marc Schweigert on LinkedIn
devkeydet (@devkeydet) on Twitter
ALM Patterns and Practices
ALM Toolkit for Makers
ALM Toolkit for Advanced Makers
Scottish Summit: From Zero to ALM in Demos
PowerCAT Live channel on YouTube
Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy
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
#82. Join me with Marc Schweigert, a programme manager on the Power Customer Advisory Team at Microsoft as we talk about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) approaches suited to novices and citizen developers through to professional developers. A healthy application lifecycle process is critical if you're going to build amazing, agile, Dynamics 365 and Power Apps platform applications. I think it's great that Microsoft is finally providing more prescriptive advice for how to achieve healthy ALM and providing tools to help us get there.
Make sure you stick around until the end of this episode to find out how you can get access to the bonus episode with Neil Benson and Marc Schweigert's extended interview.
Our discussion covers:
If you'd like to hear that bonus extended interview, please make sure you subscribe to the Amazing Apps show in your podcast player and set it to download new episodes automatically.
Resources
Marc Schweigert on LinkedIn
devkeydet (@devkeydet) on Twitter
ALM Patterns and Practices
ALM Toolkit for Makers
ALM Accelerator for Advanced Makers
Scottish Summit: From Zero to ALM in Demos
PowerCAT Live channel on YouTube
Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy
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
#81. Gustaf Westerlund CIO and founder at CRM-Konsulterna asks, "How can we get customers to really understand that an agile approach is best for them?"
Agile is built on trust. Trust that the developing partner will do their best. But if the customer has been burned many times before, this can be hard to gain. And half-hearted trust becomes half-hearted agile."
I dive into the detail and expand on my top three tips:
Know Scrum - get your business development team members trained as well as your delivery team because they’re the people your customers will meet first.
Know Your Customer - if you can, find out their preconceptions and adjust your message either based on their predisposition or their role
Know the Benefits - some of the benefits are better software, earlier value, higher ROI and shorter payback, higher user satisfaction, greater transparency, more efficient capital allocation, lower risk, more customer control over scope, more collaborative way of working and greater professional rewards. Cherry-pick whichever of those benefits you think will resonate with whoever you’re talking to.
Resources:
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
#80. Richard asks about working with user stories in a Dynamics 365 or Power Platform agile project.
I'll spend this episode talking about user stories on Dynamics 365 and Power Platform projects and I’ll share three traps to avoid when working with user stories when building Power Platform and Dynamics 365 apps using Scrum.
Resources
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
#79. Bonus extended interview with CJ Brooks, a Fundraising and Engagement Architect at Mission CRM as we talk about how Mission CRM closed the doors on their consulting practice to focus on building the Mission CRM fundraising and engagement application for nonprofit organizations. In this bonus episode, CJ and I try to solve the Elon Musk problem in data verse.
Resources
CJ Brooks on LinkedIn
MISSION CRM on LinkedIn
MISSION website
Demo: Dynamics 365 Fundraising & Engagement
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
#78. Join me with CJ Brooks, a Fundraising and Engagement Architect at Mission CRM as we talk about how Mission CRM closed the doors on their consulting practice to focus on building the Mission CRM fundraising and engagement application for nonprofit organizations.
Make sure you stick around until the end of this episode to find out how you can get access to the bonus episode with Neil Benson and CJ Brooks extended interview.
Our discussion covers:
If you'd like to hear that bonus extended interview, please make sure you subscribe to the Amazing Apps show in your podcast player and set it to download new episodes automatically.
Resources
CJ Brooks on LinkedIn
MISSION CRM on LinkedIn
MISSION website
Demo: Dynamics 365 Fundraising & Engagement
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
#77. Bonus extended interview with Bert Wijns, a Global Solution Strategy Architect a Microsoft and co-founder of Power Accelerate as we talk about the tool he created which allows you to take a screenshot of a legacy application or database schema and have a Power App built in a few minutes with the legacy data migrated. Sound crazy? Listen on to hear more about Bert Wijns' Power Accelerate.
Resources
Transcript: AmazingApps26Bonus.wav transcribed by Sonix | Automatically convert audio and video to text | Sonix
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
#76. Join me with Bert Wijns, a Global Solution Strategy Architect a Microsoft and co-founder of Power Accelerate as we talk about the tool he created which allows you to take a screenshot of a legacy application or database schema and have a Power App built in a few minutes with the legacy data migrated. Sound crazy? Listen on to hear more about Bert Wijns' Power Accelerate.
Make sure you stick around until the end of this episode to find out how you can get access to the bonus episode with Neil Benson and Bert Wijns' extended interview.
Our discussion covers:
If you'd like to hear that bonus extended interview, please make sure you subscribe to the Amazing Apps show in your podcast player and set it to download new episodes automatically.
Resources
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
#75. Join me with Haniel Croitoru, Associate Director of Protiviti, a Technology Consulting solutions provider in Toronto, Canada. Haniel shares a story about one of his power platform projects for a not-for-profit client and shares the lessons learned about multi-language deployments, implementation approach, executive sponsorship, and change in user adoption.
Our discussion covers:
It was great to hear how he's designed a solution for multi-language, Power Apps user interfaces, his agile approach to building business applications, and how he addresses change management and user adoption in his projects.
Resources
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
#74. Join me with Vasco Duarte who runs Oikosofy a coaching company in Finland and is also behind the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. Vasco is the author of a fascinating book, #NoEstimates. Vasco and I chat about the challenges of estimating complex business application software, particularly in the CRM and ERP domains, and how the No Estimates movement and the method covered in his book can help business applications teams construct collaborative contracts with their customers and never deliver late again.
At the end of this podcast episode, I give details on how you can win one of 14 copies of Vasco's book, the No Estimates book.
Our discussion covers
Resources
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
#73. Daryl LaBar and Jonas Rapp, co-hosts of the XrmToolCast join Neil Benson to answer the questions about how to document complex systems when asked to "devise a roadmap for migrating a Dynamics CRM 2013 and a CRM 2016 environment into a single Dynamics 365 online environment ."
A documentation tools masterclass from two experts in the field who discuss what tools to use for on-premise implementations when Snapshot! for Dynamics 365 can’t be used.
Resources
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
#72. Michael Nunes asks, "When multiple systems are being delivered by different parties, I find that we have to design the details upfront, then use agile for the delivery of the Dynamics 365 systems. Is this your experience too?"
Michael's question has two layers that we address in this episode: upfront design and team composition.
Upfront design is based on three assumptions:
We challenge those assumptions and investigate the drawbacks. Then describe an alternative approach: emergent design.
Nexus is a scaled Scrum framework used when there are multiple Scrum teams working on a single application. We discover how to reconsider the composition of developers in our scrum teams when scaling beyond one team.
Resources
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
#71. Daniel Kerridge says, "I'm the only developer in my team so I just wondered if there's a special version of Scrum that works in that scenario."
There are three sets of accountabilities in the scrum team: the product owner, the scrum master and developers. But how many developers do you need?
In the previous version of the Scrum Guide, the recommended minimum number of developers to have a cross-functional team was three. But that minimum was removed from the 2020 Scrum Guide.
Guy's & St. Thomas's NHS Foundation Trust ran a successful project to implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 using a tiny scrum team. Find out how in this episode.
Plus three conditions to meet if you have a tiny scrum team.
Resources
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
#70. Dan Madden, a program manager at Acensus, asks, "What’s the best way to help bridge that gap between [IT and] the business and ultimately the end-users?"
In this episode, you'll learn about the five characteristics of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform projects that have a close relationship between business and IT so that there's no gap in your business applications initiatives.
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
#69. In this episode, Andreas Dutz, Business Development Manager at HSO from Bavaria, Germany, asks, "Have you defined what agile means? Are your teams trained in the Agile Manifesto and are your teams applying it today?"
The Manifesto for Agile Software development has some flaws you should be aware of. Instead of memorising it and applying it word for word, your teams should consider it and devise your own Manifesto for No-Code/Low-Code Application Development.
Resources
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
#68. What does the structure of a scales business application project look like? What groups and roles do you need when you've got 50 or more team members working together for a year or more to build a large, complex application?
In this episode, you'll learn about a model project structure so that you can compare it to yours or use it as a baseline when establishing your own enterprise project team.
Resources
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
#67. In this Q&A episode, Stephen Price , Digital Solution Architect at ITK Consulting in Canada, asks, "How should we manage scope creep within a sprint in an agile project?"
The scope of our product is defined by the product backlog, and the scope of our project is a subset of the product backlog. Both are managed by the product owner: the single person responsible and accountable for the product backlog. In my Dynamics 365 and Power Apps projects, the product owner also manages the project scope.
Once you’ve set the sprint goal and agreed on the sprint backlog, what happens if someone needs to or wants to change the sprint backlog?
Here are five occasions when my teams are asked to change to the sprint backlog:
Congratulations to Gavin Embley, another recent Customery Academy student who recently achieved his Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master I certification. You can join Gavin and get started with my Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free mini-course where you'll learn the basics and benefits of taking an agile approach to building amazing, agile Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#66. Matt Venamore, scrum master at RACQ, asks about how to handle data migration on agile Dynamics 365 projects.
My recommended approach is for the data migration team to conduct a proof-of-concept or prototyping exercise (just like many business apps teams do) to uncover challenges, test their assumptions and learn as much as possible about the data.
Then work closely with the business applications team to iteratively and incrementally prepare the data and the migration procedures.
Resources
Snapshot! for Dynamics CRM/365
XrmToolBox: ERD Visio Builder
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
#65. Neil discusses the five most important changes in Scrum Guide 2020 for Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 teams:
Customery Academy's course, Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps, will be updated in time for the new Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master certification assessment on 9 January. You can get $100 off if you join before 31 December using coupon code: 93G7PCAH.
What do you think of the 2020 Scrum Guide? Which changes do you think will have the most impact on Power Platform and Dynamics 365 teams?
Visit the Amazing Applications page on LinkedIn, and let me know in the comments for this episode.
Resources
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
#64. Carolle Bruce, Director of Information Technology at Avcorp Industries in Vancouver, asks, "What's the best argument for when senior management says, 'All this agile stuff is great but I don't see why you'd have a scrum master on your project when you could have an agile PM instead.'?"
There are some important differences between the role and responsibilities of a project manager and a scrum master. But in Scrum, the role that is closest to the role of a project manager in a traditional project is not the scrum master but the product owner.
Listen in to find out more about the similarities and differences.
Resources
Free mini-course: Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
Send your question to the Amazing Apps show: Send a Voicemail
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
#63. David Mochrie, a Power Platform consultant at Magnetism in Auckland, asks, "Should we have a standard set of user stories for Dynamics 365?"
A long time ago, I tried to make it easy to write detailed user interface design specifications for Dynamics CRM using a wireframe prototyping tool called Axure RP Pro.
I spent hundreds of hours building replicas of hundreds of Dynamics CRM screens that I planned to reuse over and over again in my specifications.
But it didn't work out that way for me.
And I don't think a standard set of user stories would work out for David, either.
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
#62. Anand Kushalnagar, a project manager at Nexon Asia Pacific in Sydney, asks, "At the moment, we are using a hybrid implementation approach for our projects. How can you deliver Dynamics 365 business central projects in a fully agile methodology when there are so many dependencies between the various modules?"
You can transition to Scrum gradually by introducing one or two agile practices to your team each sprint.
ERP teams working on Dynamics 365 Business Central, Finance & Operations, Supply Chain or HR are slowly learning how to embrace Scrum even when there are interdependent modules, and we can't always release small increments into production.
One way to do that is to deliver incremental features and co-ordinate closely and frequently with other team members or teams unblock interdependencies you might have in your product backlog.
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
#61. Mark Llewellyn, Director of Technology at Osmosys Software Solutions in London asks, "How can you be sure you've captured all the requirements?"
Traditional approaches, like Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step, pretend that we can capture all the requirements upfront at the start of a project before we've started development.
Upfront requirements analysis doesn't work.
You can't capture requirements by writing them down, and you shouldn't try to uncover requirements before your users know something about Power Apps or Dynamics 365 and your developers know something about your users.
Story mapping is an alternative method to help you capture more of your requirements.
But you'll never capture them all. So don't try too hard, Mark.
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
#60. This year, Scrum is celebrating its 25th anniversary.
To celebrate, the Scrum Guide 2020 is being published at a free global launch event at 10:00 EST on Wednesday 18 November 2020.
Click here to register for the Scrum Guide 2020 launch event
The launch event is being hosted on Zoom, and the largest Zoom plan has an attendee limit of 1,000. Register for the event today, and join the session early to make sure you can get in.
I expect the Scrum Guide 2020 to be even leaner and simpler to help more practitioners in new industries and domains adopt Scrum.
I’m excited about the changes and I’m planning to incorporate significant changes to my Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps course as Scrum.org also updates the Professional Scrum Master certification syllabus.
Student shout out
Congratulations to Michael Handley, IT Project Manager at Health Carousel in Ohio, who joined my Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps audio course and recently achieved his Professional Scrum Master certification. If you’re interested in learning the Scrum framework and how to apply it to Power Apps and Dynamics 365 projects at a much lower cost then the audio course might be an option. It’s US$29 and contains audio versions of all the videos, the quizzes and the practice exam.
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
#59. Neal Carty, a Business Solutions Consultant at Traction On Demand in Toronto asks:
Resources mentioned in this episode
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
#58. I had to fire a client this week.
I felt terrible that I wasn't able to help, yet relieved that I stuck to my approach and my principles.
Listen in to find out what happened.
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
#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.
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
#56. The biggest online community event of the year, Dynamics Con 2020, is just around the corner: Wednesday 9 to Thursday 10 September. I'm joined in this special episode by a special guest to discuss this special event -- the event's director, Molly Fuschel.
You can register for free today at DynamicsCon.com.
I'm presenting "Tell Me a Story", which will be packed with proven practices for managing your Dynamics 365 or Power Apps product backlog. My session is 9am US Central Time, Wednesday 9 September.
I'll be available during and after my session to answer your questions and hang out with Amazing App builders. I hope to see you there.
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
#55. In this second episode on estimating Microsoft Business Applications we answer your financial sponsor's two favourite questions:
If you're a Dynamics 365 or Power Platform project manager, business analyst, solution architect, pre-sales consultant, developer, or in business development, you'll find out how to answer those key questions in this in-depth episode.
For full show notes and transcript, visit https://customery.com/004
Check out part 1, Estimating Power Platform and Dynamics 365 applications, to discover more about forecasting how long it's going to take and how much it's going to cost.
To join my free Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps mini-course, visit https://customery.com/foundations.
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
#54. I'm joined by Dani Kahil, Microsoft Business Applications practice lead at Empired, who shares the story behind one of his client projects, Lives Lived Well.
Show Contacts
Show Resources
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
#53. If you're building Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate or Power Virtual Agent applications, when and how should you be estimating your requirements, releases and applications?
Check out part 2, Estimating how long and how much, to discover more about forecasting how long it's going to take and how much it's going to cost.
For full show notes and transcription, visit: https://customery.com/002
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
#52. For this special episode, I asked 15 industry leaders how they were coping with the coronavirus restrictions and what advice they'd give to their younger selves if their career was affected by the impacts of an economic recession.
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
#51. Welcome to the new Amazing Apps show. This episode is a bonus episode for previous subscribers of the Scrum Dynamics podcast explaining the reasons behind the name change and gives you a sneak preview of the new theme music.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#50. Chris Kendrick is the founder and CEO of Mercury xRM, who develop recruitment software on Dynamics 365 Sales. We discuss parsing resumes (and fine-tuning your own resume), as well as entity model designs, ISV product development, implementation approaches, remote training and user adoption incentives.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#49. I'm joined by Gus Gonzalez and Joel Lindstrom to discuss the role of solution architects in agile teams implementing Microsoft Business Applications.
We chill out on the mics and discuss:
Gus Gonzalez
Gus Gonzalez on LinkedIn
Gus Gonzalez on Twitter
Eleva8 Solutions website
CRM MVP Podcast
Joel Lindstrom
Joel Lindstrom on LinkedIn
Hitachi Solutions America on LinkedIn
CRM.Audio Podcast
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
#48. My guest is Clément Olivier from Javista in Nantes, France.
Clément was recently awarded a Power Platform FastTrack Recognized Solution Architect designation. He was one of 8 first-time Power Apps architects and 5 Power BI architects to be recognised, in addition to a new group of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and Customer Engagement architects.
It's a recognition from the Microsoft FastTrack team within the Business Apps product engineering group of a solution architect who consistently exhibits deep architecture expertise and creates high-quality solutions during customer engagements. Congratulations to all of you.
I invited Clément to share with some of the factors behind one of his recent successful projects in which his team built two Power Apps for a kitchen design factory.
Listen in as we discover how they used a concierge app to welcome guests and capture their sentiment regarding kitchen samples using Azure Cognitive Services. Clément’s team used a rapid prototyping technique to get early feedback from users on the features they needed in their kitchen design Power App. One of his recommendations is to know the capabilities of the different components available — canvas and model Power Apps, CDS, Azure services so you can make the most appropriate design choices.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#47. Is Scrum the best approach to use for every Microsoft Business Application?
No!
Join me, as we explore the Stacey and Cynefin models that help us make judgements about which types of applications are suited to a Scrum approach and which aren't.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#46. Ryan Ripley joins me in Amazing Apps to discuss his new book, Fixing Your Scrum.
Ryan is a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org. We also discuss:
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
#45. This is a special, bonus episode of Amazing Applications with a live recording from inside my current Scrum teams' daily scrum. Take a sneak peek as my developers share their progress with each other and adjust the sprint backlog as they learn more about what they've accomplished.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#44. Someone sends me an "Agile is Dead" article at least once a year. Are these articles with their clickbait headlines just opinion pieces with no data to back up the authors' claims or are they well-researched and thought-provoking journalism?
Here's one, Agile software development is dead. Deal with it. It was written by Jason Bloomberg and published in SiliconANGLE.
I have some fun with the author's claims that agile software is dead because it's 19, is impossible to scale, and promotes exclusion.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#43. EY Kalman, also known as the CRM Ninja, joins me in this episode of Amazing Apps to reveal the critical factors behind the success of his Dynamics CRM project at Orbis Investments.
Listen in as he reveals his critical success factors on this project.
Resources
EY Kalman on LinkedIn
TheCRMNinja on Twitter
TheCRM.Ninja website
TheCRMNinja on YouTube
Orbis Investments website
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
#42. The topic for this episode is scrum teams. The composition and the characteristics of your scrum team remain fundamental to you having any success with an agile approach when you're implementing business applications.
I recently refreshed the content of the scrum team section in my Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps course. In this refresh, I added a new video which answers frequently asked questions about scrum teams. I thought it would be a good idea to share some of those FAQs with the Scrum Dynamics audience to give you a sneak peek into the kind of topics you'll find in the course.
Student shout-out to Jackie Walker from Capgemini and Veronica Kamph from CRM-Konsulterna.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#41. Lots of Microsoft Business Applications teams use Azure DevOps Repos and Pipelines for managing their source code and automating their code integration, build and deployment processes.
But what about using Azure DevOps Boards to plan, track and collaborate on your work in a Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power Automate or Power BI project?
Tricia Sinclair, a CRM Pre-Sales Consultant at DXC Technology, is on a mission to help us all use Azure DevOps Boards for more than Repos and Pipelines.
Resources
Tricia Sinclair on LinkedIn
Tricia Sinclair on Twitter
Tricia Sinclair website
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
#40. There are two ways of handling bugs in Scrum:
Mike Cohn is a Bug Estimator but Mitch Lacey is a Bug Zapper (so is almost every other Scrum trainer and team).
Listen in to find out which approach I recommend for Microsoft Business Applications teams using Scrum.
Support the show
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
#39. Imagine you're a member of a development team implementing Microsoft Business Applications using the Scrum framework. What do you do when you've completed the item you're working on?
Inspired by my favourite TV show of all time, The West Wing, here's the Definition of Next that my team uses to answer the question, "What's Next?"
Thanks to The West Wing Weekly podcast and to my scrum master, Matthew Venamore, for the inspiration for the Definition of Next.
Visit customery.com/39 to download my Definition of Next checklist.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#38. If you’re brand new to agile software development and are wondering how an agile approach can be applied to your Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power BI or Power Automate project, I’ve launched a new free mini-course: Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps.
The course is ideal if you are interested in learning about agile software development and how business apps projects can benefit from an agile approach. After taking this course, you'll understand the history of agile software development, and it's values and principles. You'll also discover the Scrum framework and the benefits it can bring to your Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power BI or Power Automate application.
In about an hour, the Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps course will help you understand agile software development, and the basics and benefits of the Scrum framework in six high-quality videos, with captions, transcripts and quizzes.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#37. Steve Books is the Chief Technology Officer of Bam Boom Cloud (previously known as Cooper Parry IT Solutions), 2020 winner of the Microsoft Partner of the Year award for Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Bam Boom Cloud is a mid-market accounting firm based in the UK. They've had a lot of success with the partner-to-partner business model that has eluded so many other Microsoft partners.
Steve also shares his insights into Bam Boom Cloud's innovative business development process for qualifying prospective clients and engaging them remotely on rapid projects to deploy Dynamics 365 Business Central quickly and successfully. It was the repeatability of Bam Boom Cloud's process that contributed to their Microsoft PotY award.
Well done Steve, Vicky and the Bam Boom Cloud team.
Resources
Steve Brooks on LinkedIn
Bam Boom Cloud on LinkedIn
Bam Boom Cloud website
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
#36. David Conti surprised me with the size of Velrada's project that was a finalist in the 2019 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Dynamics 365 Field Service awards.
I had always assumed that PotY awards were a recognition of complex, enterprise projects successfully delivered by Microsoft's finest.
Listen in as David reveals the size of Velrada's project at engineering maintenance company, Monadelphous. He also shares with us Velrada's agile approach, the tools that his team used to deliver the project and the importance of helping your customer's IT team learn about Dynamics 365.
Resources
David Conti on LinkedIn
David Conti on Twitter
Velrada on LinkedIn
Velrada website
Mondelphous website
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
#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).
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#34. I chat with Andrew Bibby about his successful Dynamics 365 project at Devon Financial Services*.
Andrew is a Microsoft Business Applications MVP with over 12 years’ experience implementing Dynamics CRM and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for several Microsoft partners and through his own company as an independent project advisor.
The CRM project at Devon Financial Services was a five-year business transformation programme to improve the efficiency of their financial advisors by digitising paper-based client on-boarding and sales processes. Andrew’s role as an independent project advisor is to assist the customer and their Microsoft partner to achieve the project’s outcomes.
Listen in as Andrew highlights several critical factors to the success of the CRM project at Devon Financial Services:
Resources
Andrew Bibby on LinkedIn
Andrew Bibby on Twitter
Proximo3 on LinkedIn
Proximo3 website
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
#33. I'm joined by Johan Adenmark and Carolina Edvinsson from NAB Solutions.
NAB Solutions was a finalist in the 2019 Microsoft Partner of the Year awards for the innovative work migrating 25 Dynamics NAV customers to Dynamics 365 Business Central within just a few months.
Johan and Carolina share their experience undertaking so many cloud migrations and how they've had to transform how NAB Solutions works in order to migrate or deploy one customer every couple of days.
We also learn their advice for nominating your organisation for the PotY awards. This was the first time that NAB Solutions had entered and they've achieved a finalist position in their first go.
Download the PotY award rules, guidelines, judges' advice and FAQs from the Microsoft Partner awards site.
Resources
Johan Adenmark on LinkedIn
Carolina Edvinsson on LinkedIn
NAB Solutions on LinkedIn
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
#32. Have you ever been asked:
I've heard this question lots of times from IT leaders who want to know whether our Dynamics 365 system will continue to be supportable, extensible, updateable and performant.
But how should we answer it?
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#31. Have you ever had a Dynamics 365 or Power Apps disaster?
I share the tale of my failed Power Apps Portals project. It got cancelled by the client before we released it to production.
What went wrong? Are there warning signs that you can spot to avoid a Dynamics disaster of your own?
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#30. Emergent design is an advanced practice for Microsoft Business Application team experienced in Scrum.
What is emergent design?
When we practice emergent design, the development team designs the solution to meet the users’ needs just before we build the feature.
The opposite of emergent design is up-front design. This is when the solution is designed in the Design phase of the project, usually by a solution architect, based on the requirements specification published in the Analysis phase, and before any software has been developed.
Advantages of emergent design
Compared to designing all your features up-front near the beginning of the project, emergent design offers several advantages:
Listen to Scrum Dynamics podcast episode 30 or watch the video on YouTube to find out why I love emergent design and how I used it on my recent project to find the best possible design for integrating Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement with Adobe Campaign.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#29. Can you use a definition of done for a sprint?
I outline six ideas for a definition of done for a user story and three ideas for a definition of done for a sprint.
According to the Scrum Guide, the definition of done helps us agree on when a product backlog item is complete. A sprint, on the other hand, is a time-boxed event so it's done when the time is up.
But my teams have found it useful to have a definition of done for a sprint too. And one of our criteria is to run the Power Apps Solution Checker on our custom solutions.
The Power Apps Solution Checker is now generally available in Dataverse. It runs hundreds of checks on your plug-ins, customer workflow activities, web resources and configurations and warns you if there are any issues. Running the Power Apps Solution Checker at the end of every sprint helps my team ensure that their solutions are supported, maintainable, extensible and won't cause any performance issues.
What definition of done do you use for your user stories? Do you use a definition of done for sprints or releases? I'd love to know in the comments.
Links mentioned in the show:
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
#28. Shawn Tabor wants to know whether to estimate project effort in days or story points. Aren't they the same thing?
I've used four ways of estimating effort in my Dynamics 365 projects:
Estimating in days is an absolute estimation method, whereas t-shirts and story points are both relative estimation methods. This means that we compare the relative size of items using a scale, rather than trying to estimate the absolute size.
Story point estimation has several benefits:
Shawn, stop estimating Microsoft Business Applications projects in days and start using story points!
Resources
Shawn Tabor on LinkedIn
CRM Hobbit on Twitter
CRM Hobbit website
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
#27. Jonas Wauters from KPMG Belgium has a challenge pitching a Dynamics 365 project using Scrum to a prospective client. In particular, he'd like to know how to handle it when clients ask those three little questions:
Neil's advice is to avoiding assuming that if a client is familiar with agile that everyone in the client's team is familiar with Scrum. Make sure you describe your Scrum framework in your proposal and presentation so that everyone has a common understanding.
Neil also describes how he uses user story maps to help clients visualise the scope, timeline and costs associated with a Dynamics 365 project.
You can find out more about story maps for Dynamics 365 here: https://customery.com/storymaps.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#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
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#25. Neil is attempting a little experiment with a short, single question episode on the Amazing Applications podcast and on Youtube. Let’s see if he can answer your questions about Scrum for Dynamics 365 in ten minutes or less.
The question in this episode is from Ruan Kilian, a Dynamics 365 developer in Brisbane, Australia. Ruan asks,
“Is it acceptable for a developer to prepare and write down the answers to the three questions and read them out at the daily scrum?”
Listen in or watch the episode to find out why Neil think it’s perfectly acceptable but could be dangerous.
If you’d like to ask me Neil question about Scrum for Microsoft Business Applications, click on the Send Voicemail widget on Customery.com or send a video to [email protected].
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#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:
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
#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
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#22. Some ideas turn out to be great ideas. Some ideas look like great ideas at the time but don't turn out so well in hindsight. Those are antipatterns.
A pattern is a repeatable idea that solves a common problem, and should be adopted by others. An antipattern seems like an answer to a problem, but turns out badly and should be avoided by others.
There are hundreds of Scrum antipatterns you’ll encounter as you embrace Scrum in your Dynamics 365 projects. In this episode, Neil highlights the top ten Scrum event antipatterns that he's witnessed in Dynamics 365 projects.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#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
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#20. Seth Bacon and Neil catch up to discuss Scrum in the public sector.
You can connect with Seth Bacon on LinkedIn and @SethTBacon on Twitter. Check out Seth’s blog/vlog, The Bacon Bytes, for Dynamics 365 administrators.
Seth’s having success implementing Dynamics 365 in city, county and state organisations in health and human services.
Seth and Neil discuss how to sell agile projects in public sector organisations, how to handle fixed-price, fixed-scope, fixed-timeline contracts and projects by encouraging the customer’s product owner to take control of prioritising the project scope and adopting an agile mindset.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#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.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#18. Neil recently presented a live session on YouTube for the Dynamics 365 Community Corner. He recorded this special version of his presentation for the podcast covering:
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
#17. Dermot and Neil discuss what to measure in your Dynamics 365 projects when you're using Scrum.
Tracking velocity is the basic measure of progress. Velocity is the total number of story points of 'done' stories in each sprint and should be averaged over several sprints (usually 3 to 5 sprints).
Using velocity within the team to plan the capacity for the next sprint, and by the product owner for forecasting the release.
There's no velocity credit for partially done stories at the end of the sprint.
Velocity predictability is a measure of how close the actual velocity of each sprint is to the planned velocity to track the accuracy of estimating and capacity planning within the team.
Neil discusses using a sprint burn down chart for highlighting an issue with testing stories, and a release burn down chart for highlighting changes in project scope. What to include in an iteration report for managers and stakeholders. (Except for Dermot who doesn't do status reporting!)
Tracking effort spent on bug fixing and setting aside a buffer when planning your sprint capacity.
Tracking percentage of stories blocked within a sprint to highlight issues impeding the scrum team's progress.
Remember to surround your metrics with conversations to help your team improve their performance rather than report performance to stakeholders.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#16. Dermot and Neil talk about the last two events in a sprint: the sprint review and the sprint retrospective, including:
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
#15. Dermot’s picked up his Professional Scrum Master II and Professional Scrum Product Owner certifications. Good timing, Dermot, because our first question was from Dick Clark at eBECS who has a client project who wants to get certified in Scrum.
Neil has recorded the Scrum Guide as an audio stream on SoundCloud to help Dermot get to sleep at night, and they debate whether holding a Scrum certification or having experience is more important for scrum masters.
Squads, Tribes, Chapters and Guilds. Dermot gives Neil a primer on the types of groups Scrum teams use to organise themselves as they scale. It might be called the Spotify Model, but not if you ask Spotify.
Joel Lindstrom drops in to admit his Scrum teams have a problem right-sizing stories to fit within a sprint. The response involves splitting the epic user story into vertical slices that can still be demonstrated to the product owner at the end of each sprint even if the feature isn’t ready for release for several sprints.
Dermot also provides Neil with some advice on helping his new Scrum squads define their definition of ready, definition of done and social contract at the beginning of a new Dynamics 365 project.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#14. Neil provides a behind-the-scenes peek into ‘Orientation Week’ in his Dynamics 365 project kicking off this week, the Jupiter Programme.
Orientation Week (O-Week) is designed to onboard two Scrum teams so that they can start delivering the Dynamics 365 workstream of an enterprise programme as quickly as possible. I talk through some of the planned O-Week activities and provide my assessment of some of the project’s risks and strengths.
What are your experiences of launching new Dynamics 365 projects? Get involved in the discussion in the Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps group on LinkedIn.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#13. Neil covers all aspects of sprint planning for Dynamics 365 projects:
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
#12. Co-hosts, Neil and Dermot (yes, he's back!), discuss the sprint backlog.
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
#11. Estimating product backlog items using planning poker is the topic for this episode.
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
#10. Neil compares the to-do list on his 100-year old house to the product backlog and goes on to describe:
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
#9. Neil is joined by Nick Doelman (@ReadyXRM) who shares his experience learning Scrum and applying it to one of his recent Dynamics 365 projects.
During the episode we cover:
Remember to download the Scrum Terms Worksheet for a handy guide to all the Scrum terms you hear in this episode.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#8. Dermot and Neil answer questions submitted by podcast listeners about:
You can submit your questions by tweeting @customery or clicking on the Send Voicemail button anywhere on the Customery website.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#7. Dermot and Neil discuss sprints and the daily scrum events in a Scrum project.
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
#6. Neil and Dermot discuss the development team in a Scrum project implementing Dynamics 365.
Covered in this show:
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
#5. This episode of Scrum Dynamics is brought to you live from the Dynamics 365 User Group Summit EMEA in Dublin, Ireland. In this session, Neil covers the basics of Scrum and best practices for each of Scrum’s roles, events, and deliverables from his Dynamics 365 and CRM projects over the last ten years. He also highlights the lessons learned from his first Scrum for Dynamics CRM project at Premier Medical Group.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#4. Neil and Dermot discuss the role of the scrum master in a Dynamics 365 project.
Remember to download the Scrum Terms Worksheet for a handy guide to all the Scrum terms you hear in this episode.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#3. Neil introduces the role of the Product Owner in Dynamics 365 projects, including:
Remember to download the Scrum Terms cheat sheet for a handy guide to all the Scrum terms you hear in this episode.
Support the showCONNECT
🌏 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
#2. Neil and Dermot introduce the Scrum framework’s events, roles, deliverables and the Scrum theory.
We cover:
Download the Scrum Terms cheat sheet to go along with this episode for a handy guide to all the Scrum terms you’ll hear in this show.
#Scrum
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
#1. This is the premiere episode of the Scrum Dynamics podcast with Neil Benson and Dermot Ryan. If you have heard of Scrum or would like to use it in one of your Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects, you’re in the right spot.
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
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.