Episodes

#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 t...

#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: How Stephen's background of being a software developer and a financial adviser could be the perfect blend of expertise for his application development busines...

#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: The physical logistics of drive-up COVID testing for thousands of people. Why custom scheduling was used instead of the inbuilt scheduling functionality of the Dynamics Healthcare Accelerator on Power Platform The...

#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: Knowledge sharing within teams - invest in team members in a semi-formal structured environment, sharing what they've just learned with their coworkers. Overcoming the end-user learning curve moving from Excel to Power ...

#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: The user adoption approach used to train and communicate with thousands or tens of thousands of users at a time, using Power Apps. Building data import automation using Power Automate. Approaches to taking a big enterprise portfolio of applications an...

#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: Phasing long-term international enterprise projects. Adopting an agile approach to ERP. Dealing with the challenges of remote working. How they bet on the first version of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operati...

#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...

#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: The signi...

#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: Drink Australian wine or Australian beer? Use Scrum or SureStep? Include comments in your code or write unambiguous code? Call it a tab...

#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 A...

#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 y...

#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. The first trap is the level of detail. The second trap is splitting and combining stories. The third trap is managing changes to the backlog of users stories. Resources...

#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 Support the showC...

#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: How Mission CRM took a step back and pivote...

#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 Bert Wijns on LinkedIn Power Accelerate on LinkedIn Power Accelerate website Power Apps Scree...

#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 Ne...

#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: The importance of strong project sponsorship in projects that drive a lot of organisational change. Refining k...

#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 ...

#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 Daryl LaBar on LinkedIn Jonas Rapp...

#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 can know all the requirements upfront. We can design all the components upfront. There won't be any changes. ...

#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....

#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. Support the showCONNECT 🌏 Amazing Applications 🟦 Customery on LinkedIn 🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSE...

#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 Andreas Dutz on Link...

#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 6 Roles Every Enterprise Business Applications Project Should Have poster Large-scal...