Amazing Apps - learn how to build agile Dynamics 365 and Power Platform business apps using Scrum – Details, episodes & analysis

#161. Whether you’re an internal developer working for a Microsoft customer or a consultant working for a Microsoft partner: every Power Platform or Dynamics 365 project you have ever worked on has been underestimated.

Because no one wins overestimated projects...

Mentioned in this episode:

Estimating Business Apps: EOFY25 offer

My Estimating Business Apps course will help you up level up your agile practice and answer those two frequent questions: 'How long is it going to take?' and 'How much is it going to cost?'. Normally priced at U$199, it’s designed to give you full confidence when scoping and sizing Dynamics 365 and Power Platform work. Estimating Business Apps is just U$50 if you go Pro before 30 June 2025. That’s a $149 saving to help you finish the (Australian financial) year stronger – and smarter. Don’t miss your chance to master the complete estimation process and quote your work like a pro.

Estimating EOFY2025

#160. Hamish Sheild is a Microsoft MVP and Power Platform consultant specialising in applying Design Thinking practices to our apps and projects to make them more human-centred. Hamish and I discuss the different activities and artifacts we've experimented with before starting the delivery phase of our Power Platform and Dynamics 365 projects.

Join us as we discuss:

03:43 Design thinking exercises and goal setting

08:45 Inclusion of developers in the discovery phase

09:48 Importance of day in the life sessions

11:59 Exploration of design sprints

17:10 Creating customer and user journey maps

18:48 Utilizing user story maps for clarity

24:21 The role of prototyping in projects

25:11 Developing solution blueprints with Dynamics 365

30:18 Size and refinement of initial product backlog

32:02 Establishing environments

32:48 Business process maps

35:35 Crafting stakeholder maps for project success

HAMISH SHEILD

• Hamish Sheild on LinkedIn
• AppRising
• Designing Business Applications

RESOURCES

• Avion for user story mapping
• StoriesOnBoard for user story mapping
• Miro for visual collaboration

RECOMMENDED EPISODES

• 130 Sprint 1 is Done!
• 120 Defining Requirements for Complex Power Apps with Hamish Sheild

👋 LET'S CONNECT

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⭐ RATE AND REVIEW THE SHOW

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👨‍💻 MY ONLINE COURSES

🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps

🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps

📐 Estimating Business Apps

#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

#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:

1. How does the Professional Scrum Product Owner certification compare to the Professional Scrum Master certification, and is it relevant for Dynamics 365?
2. What's the best way to acquire the knowledge required for PSPO certification?
3. How can we accelerate our learning and avoid high-fees for generic, in-person PSPO courses?
4. Can we mix certifications between Scrum.org and Scrum Alliance?

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master I training and certification
• Scrum.org Professional Product Owner I training and certification
• Scrum Alliance Certified Product Owner training and certification
• Professional Scrum Product Owner by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham (affiliate)
• Product Mastery: From Good to Great Product Owner by Geoff Watts (affiliate)

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.

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

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

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

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

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

#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:

1. How long is it going to take?
2. How much is it going to cost?

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