Building an SFD in Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform

There’s a lot of talk about software delivery methodologies these days. To those not constantly reading the latest 400+ page textbooks on methodologies, it can be quite hard to keep up.

Agile methodologies such as Scrum can be great, but to work optimally they require a fair amount of education for all stakeholders involved, which is not always practical. Waterfall is considered by many as old hat, but lots of successful projects are still delivered this way. Hybrid methodologies can also work and can work practically and commercially. What is more important, across whatever methodology you use, are the techniques you use as part of these methodologies to define solutions and deliver real business outcomes.

There is a technique that I like to use which is ideally suited to Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. It’s a great technique because:

It helps you gather real requirements aligned to the technology. We shouldn’t pretend to understand what someone else is imagining about a technology they have never seen before and try to make it fit.
It starts you thinking about the end-game very early in the process.
It helps you learn new technologies and capabilities as they are released.
By virtue of this techniques name, you are setting the bar quite low, so risk of embarrassing yourself is minimal (although conversely, partial failure here may be a very good thing).
It can provide valuable insight into estimates for future tasks.

It’s called the Shitty First Draft, hereby referred as an SFD.

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Building a Power Platform Dream Team

As Microsoft Practice Lead for Codec in UK and Northern Ireland, I’m regularly thinking how Codec has grown a Microsoft Dynamics practice from a small team of 2 people to over 100 Microsoft ‘Power Platform‘ Consultants, in little over four years. In the past two years, our Belfast team has experienced rapid growth with exciting plans to grow further. Building teams at such a rate can challenge any company of any size, but Codec’s success has not come around by accident or luck.

To gain an insight into some of the factors that have helped Codec become both Microsoft Ireland partner of the year and Microsoft Dynamics partner of the year in successive years, here are some of the principles we’ve adopted in Belfast, and across the Codec group, to ensure that we stay the best at what we do. Continue reading “Building a Power Platform Dream Team” →

PowerApps is dead. Long live XRMPowerApps.

In April 2017 I attended SummitEMEA in Amsterdam and listened intently when Matt Barbour told us that a true Microsoft Dynamics XRM image – i.e. a CRM organisation instance with only accounts, contacts, activities and nothing else – existed internally within Microsoft. This interested me as partners have been calling out for this since the old CRM 4.0 on-premise days. At that time it seemed there were no immediate plans to do anything with it.

Fast forward one year, and this time closer to home in SummitEMEA in Dublin, April 2018 and Matt Barbour again moved the conversation on a country mile or three. I discovered that XRM no longer officially exists in name, but does exist in practice and has been renamed PowerApps. So, how does this work? Continue reading “PowerApps is dead. Long live XRMPowerApps.” →

Segmenting your Contact records with Dynamics 365 Apps

I’ve been using apps with Dynamics 365 for some time now and they are a great way of simplifying the user interface in a way that doesn’t require you to cross reference low level security permissions with Site Map XML.

One problem that has come up time and time again is the fact that different organisations often have different types of contact because of the nature of their business. There are a lot of benefits you get from using the system contact entity, which means that creating a new custom entity for a new contact type does not always make sense.

For example, consider an organisation with multiple types of service and therefore multiple different types of customers. They have contacts which may encompass the following types, and contacts may often be one or more types of these.

Staff Member
Applicant
Student
Citizen
Farmers

Continue reading “Segmenting your Contact records with Dynamics 365 Apps” →