 with another MVP Buzz Jack and I'm talking to you with Azure. Hello. Hi. How are you doing? I'm doing well. So it's a great background, great lighting. It's not it's that's not fake. That's real space, right? This is this is real. What can I throw glasses there? Yeah, it's real. For folks that don't know who you are, who are you? What do you do and where are you based? Hi, I am Azure McFarlane. I am a lead consultant for Power Platform at HSO, which is a new thing for me and I am based in Maryland just about 30 minutes outside of Washington DC. That's very cool. So how long have you been doing doing that kind of business applications consulting? Two months. Two months tomorrow. This is this is new for me. I have previously worked for pharmaceuticals for the past eight, nine years and discovered Power Platform about two years and some change ago and got really interested in it there and then magically found myself in the world of consulting very recently. So I wasn't quite looking for anything yet in Power Platform. I was doing a lot of dabbling and building things and I don't think I ever envisioned myself in a consulting tech role, but here I am and I'm very glad that I've decided to embark on this on this new adventure. You're joining that ecosystem in a hyper growth time and there's a lot of great people that are in there. You have over helping in charge of community in Microsoft. You have an ex-MBG, Heather Newman, helping run a lot of that initiative. Have you met Heather yet? I have. Yeah, we were in a women in tech group together called Tech Stylers. Heather's great. She's awesome. Yeah, so she is a long time. In fact, she's a good person for anybody that is, of course, she's in the Power Platform, the business applications world, but she was a long time. So she was an Office 365 MVP and SharePoint prior to that, ex-Microsoft. So this is a boomerang to Microsoft, but used to help put on the old tech events and things from Microsoft that turned it evolved into what is now Ignite. So she's been in the community for a long time. She probably doesn't like me phrasing it that way a long time. She's fantastic and dynamic and full of energy. So a good person to connect with. If you've not yet connected with Heather Newman and with Azure, then definitely go and connect. Tell us some of the stuff that you do. What do you do as a Power Platform consultant? I convince customers that I can help them solve their business problems. So I work in Power Automate mainly. I do Power Automate, some Canvas apps. So I was hired in my role as someone who does Power Automate. And so my first project like three days and was doing stuff with some RPA or robotic process automation for people who don't know that's Power Automate desktop. I more excel in the cloud flow space. And so at this point, I am being, well, I went on my first business trip three weeks into a client. I didn't think that Pharmaceuticals would have any relevancy outside of me being there, but it turns out I, we have pharma clients and it's very cool to be able to speak their language and then also recognize some of the issues that I've seen before in previous companies that I've worked at and how we can potentially solve those issues. And the project originally was also for like dynamics as well. And I was just kind of an add-on, I would say. I thought I was there for moral support, but then it turns out there were actually opportunities for Power Platform could be used. And it was, people were very receptive to the idea of, ah, we have very integrated systems. We want to upgrade. We would like to be able to do our job a bit easier. And so I get to just ask people, what is your way of working? Okay, what don't you like about this? What works? What doesn't work? Is this a bit cumbersome? And then I say like, actually, I think we can, we can solve this with some automation. We can solve this with a Power BI dashboard. We can solve this with fill in the blank item. And I love talking to people and being able to see what their issues are and then being able to connect the dots together and be like, let's come up with something together. You know, it's funny. I started my career as a business analyst. So so much of, remove the technology aspect of it. And I mean, that's like what a business analyst function does. It's to go in, start by understanding, how are you working today? You know, what, what, what is the way in which you work? And what are you, what are you doing? Because what are the, I'm sure you've experienced this and I'd love to hear your experience, but where people get a little bit of technology in their, their mind, they get a solution mindset without fully, you know, grasping, okay, let's look at the business problem, what you're trying to do out of one and not be burdened by the technology because it will or won't do what you need. Let's first be clear on what you're trying to accomplish. And then let's look at a password. And sometimes it's going to be very different than what they thought. You know, people will get problems through the lens of their understanding today. And so they're like, well, we are a, you know, we are a Microsoft 365 shop. They'll try to solve every problem through Microsoft 365. And while I know that our Microsoft Overlords would love us to say that it's an answer to every problem that's out there, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's a Python script. Sometimes it's something completely different. And yeah, it is. Absolutely. Yeah. And in my old, at my old company, that was something that I was brought into a role. Previously I'd done like process engineering for manufacturing sites. And then with my power automated experience got hired into a role that was like a data analyst, but technically it was just me doing like apps and flows. And when folks would come to me, we had an internal audit, right? And there was some room for improvement. People are like, we want this, you know, we want an app. And I was like, hmm, but let's talk about the business problem first. And then it turns out, of course, where they think the problem is, the problem is actually more upstream. And so if I created a solution just to take care of what they thought the issue was, the issues upstream still exist and really weren't the app wouldn't have done much, you know, for them, it wouldn't have benefited them, benefited them. So I like doing the walk me through the way of working, what happens a little bit ahead of this, what happens behind this, because the problem made out actually exists here. This is a bottleneck, but not the true bottleneck that it is. And yeah, so I like the logic behind it. I like walking people through their problems. I like problem solving. And to me, that's what Power Platform has been is at least as a, when I started as a citizen developer, there's this little ecosystem where I can kind of solve my own problems, which is what I've really enjoyed. And it's a big puzzle and the logic and figuring things out, like there's no one right way to do it either, which I think is a ton of fun. That's a great comment. There's no right way of doing things. There's a lot of discussion that's happening now around the Power Platform space around, what's the right level of governance? Because one of the problems with citizen development and great itself serve, go and solve these problems within. But then what happens with these kinds of solutions is other business units hear about the solution and they want to leverage that. And then you realize, well, what we developed there fit our needs here, doesn't really scale. So what is the, I mean, what is the right approach? How much do you spend on, okay, let's solve the problems of the team that's asking for this. Do you keep in mind what the broader potential needs are for the organization where you're developing the solutions? Or do you think about that other separate thought patterns? So that's interesting. So I'm getting more into doing enterprise architecture. So I'm learning how to do these customer engagements. What I've been doing right now is envisioning workshops. Like, oh, they've already done the architecture piece. So what are your issues right now? Where are they in priority? What's a quick win? But upstream of that is this enterprise architecture. And it's the thought of, if anybody's very curious, on GitHub, there is the Power Platform Adoption Framework document that details out like how you should be thinking about these things. You've got things like productivity apps, right, that citizen developers are typically making. It's like citizen developers. And then you have maybe business units. That's like the next level of apps. So they're important, but maybe not business critical. And then you've got these business critical apps that are maybe need a lot more attention to them or oversight on them because they are that important. And so thinking in terms of those three pillars is maybe how you deploy your app. How many people are going to be using it? Who is the target audience? And those are the types of questions that people need to ask when they're, do they want to involve citizen developers in the first place? So is it just going to be citizen developers along with IT and maybe other business units? Or is it just central IT is going to be the one creating apps and flows? All very good questions. And I'm learning a lot about this because for myself, I was just building apps and flows for my site at my last job and teaching others how to use the platform. And then I think overall, enterprise-wide, we had one enterprise-wide app for safety events, but it was largely like people trying to solve problems for their department or their site. And so that piece, I don't think I quite recognized how much when it comes to like governance and IT and security and compliance, that setup piece is that that's very important getting those pillars correct before you start on Power Platform because then like where I've been before is Power Platform came to the company and that framework wasn't set up. And so it was just you had all of these citizen developers and there was like no governance and it was very complicated to try and rein that back in. And they've been successfully been able to do it the last I've heard, but it did take some time to get there. So the structure comes first and think about who you want involved in your platform, how you're going to set up your tenants, your environments, who's going to have access to this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then moving forward with that. So I've been, I've been learning a lot. It's been kind of mind blowing. And I was like, I just like to build. So I just build and now it's thinking about all these other pieces when you're taking the platform brand new to an organization. Well, I think that's a big part of that. I think most people that are going in, you want to solve the problems and meet the immediate business needs. But then there's, and so sometimes it is, it's a different, you know, it sounds like you're working on kind of, you're looking at both areas, you're thinking about those things. But, you know, it is, can be a separate conversation about what we need to go and get. It's a lot of working with customers that want to have point solution in place, immediate bleeding, stop, help with this, this effort. And then there's an additional down the road, additional funding set aside to have somebody come in and help us. Now let's go in and build up the pillars and go and do. So to even say that like there's no real right or wrong of those, there's just certain realities, business realities. And maybe there just isn't funding and there's no way to get approval and stakeholders to approve to do that more holistic view. I agree. Yeah, because I've been in meetings where it's like the target audiences, they have very differing opinions on how they would like this to go. So dealing with one client in the past couple of weeks when we asked them like, okay, what would you like this to look like? And we don't have the necessarily we're not giving them the answers. We say like, here's what we've seen in other situations, right? Typical is how other organizations and one person was like, oh, we think that we're going to have citizen developers. We're going to have IT develop apps. We're also going to have, you know, this other sub we're going to have three groups that are going to be doing this. And we're like, well, how are you going to manage when somebody has an issue with an app? How are we going to manage that for each group? And that was a thought that they were just like, we're going to take on anything. But we were asking like, but if it's a productivity app, are you going to be having like a power apps help desk? Is that the role that you want to play? Or should your focus really be on jobs? They're like, they're usually the citizen developers, like that's not their role. They go, they went and they built that and solved that. So now are you asking them to support things outside of their other? Right, exactly. Yeah, questions like this where I was like, you know what? I hadn't thought about that before, but it makes little sense because is your IT supposed to be helping citizen developers? I think that's where like YouTube comes in, right? You're asking IT to go outside potentially their scope, whereas like somebody else was like, oh yeah, we actually don't want to touch those apps at all. If it's, it would really be like the business critical ones that are enterprise-wide that everybody needs to use. So these conversations I think are very helpful for businesses to get the wheels turning because they may think it's like, oh, it's one, it's one thing, but really it could be a very nuanced answer and depending on what the business wants to do, will also affect how they end up bringing the platform into their, their organization. That's why I think that there's such great conversations that are starting to happen now around governance. And in fact, I think this, I was just mentioning before we started recording this, we just, the Microsoft 365 conference that just happened in Las Vegas over this, this week. So here we're recording in early April of 2022. I'll say for the people that are watching it two years from now. But with that event, it was the first time that I saw a session on governance of Power Platform. And so it's great to see those conversations starting. And I think that I know that like our services teams and the partners that we work with as an ISV also are starting to have discussions and as part of their envisioning workshops of Power Platform, citizen development and how, how do we help with the solutions that we provide? What's the right way to go into structure and start thinking about having those conversations and how to set up those pillars, how to look at solution with the review process of these and improve those? Yep, ALM, all of that. Yeah, the life cycle of the solutions as well, so that we have like part of the governance of any, like any team site, any, so SharePoint team site, a team that's created a community in Yammer, whatever those things are, and the governance tools that we, that we sell, that we utilize ourselves on a regular basis, at least like every three months, I get prompted for the sites that I own, like are these still valid? Are these still the right people? And every time I get those, I go through and I look at who are the, the administrators, you know, left the company or this is the new person that's not, that should be in there. I'm constantly fine tuning that. We need to have that same level of management and administration governance over our citizen development solutions. Yeah, I agree. I think that one of the conversations I've been having lately, too, is we talk about how easy it is for people to start using the platform, right? And at conferences, like, and I've done them myself, was my, my space is I like to help beginners like citizen developers like get into Power Automate, because I think of, at least between Power BI and Power Apps, it's a little bit less formulaic on how to learn. And I remember how I learned that it was just, you know, there's now over what 600 connectors in Power Automate, and it's very hard to decide, like, what do you want to do or what can you utilize? And I love the idea of system development. And the real question is, okay, well, you get into it, we say how easy it is, et cetera, et cetera. But there's this whole process like upstream of how is your organization going to handle, like, do they even want the platform in the first place? Like, if you're using, you know, say a trial license. But how how is your organization actually going to handle you creating apps or workflows, or, or, or. So it's as much as I love the idea, I think that that conversation now it's starting to happen a little bit more, versus like, actually, you can get started in the platform, but you also need all of these things in place in order for it to work very well with you, because I can I can definitely see it being very chaotic. If everybody's just starting to create solutions places, and your organization doesn't have anything set up, somewhere where I worked previously, it was everything was in the default environment. So it wasn't necessarily the best thing. But at the time, that's just, they brought platform in, hadn't done the pillars to set anything up. And then that's, that's how it ended up. So trying to work backwards is difficult. If you are, if you are thinking, testing out changes of solutions to the production system, that's bad. That's bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's not great. Yeah. Well, the one thing I can say, it kind of wraps us up is that there's, I mean, tremendous opportunity for growth. I mean, as you've shown, I mean, there are, for people that are want to, that are strong on the business side, like, I have a marketing degree. I've been in it my entire career. But I so I found opportunities and found a pathway in some of the best coders and programs and technical heads had music degrees, math degrees, you know, from other fields, but we're just kind of drawn in by problem solving. That was me. Great opportunity and to get plugged in. So I would just add my last question for you, for folks that are interested in getting involved, like, where do you start, where would you recommend that people go to get started and plugged in on power platform? Okay. So you want to create a developer account because that's going to give you access to power platform. If your organization doesn't have it, you would want to take a look at maybe some Microsoft Learn documentation. So you can Google Microsoft Learn, they have stuff on Power Automate. I would also start at thinking about things that you do every day, not even thinking a big business solution, right? Like a big problem. Think about things that you that you do every day that are kind of redundant or maybe every week. My first flow was a copy file and replace flow, something very simple where I had a Monday meeting where our site needed to review at like the first, you know, muster of the day in your department, you would review the safety topic of the week. The thing was that the safety team may or may not have sent out the PowerPoint, they might have only sent it to managers. Sometimes they would forget and send it out on a Tuesday. And so that file, it lived in the same place every week. It was always modified by Monday. So all I decided to do was because our team would, we would spend the first, you know, five minutes about like who got the safety topic for the day, if anyone at all and trying to hunt this down. I just thought, okay, I'm just going to copy the file from their SharePoint site to our SharePoint site that was connected to Teams. Voila. Never had to think about where that file ever lived again or who had it. We just knew if it was there and it was the same as last week, then it just hadn't been updated. But it ran every morning, half an hour before that meeting or every Monday before that meeting. And that was just something that was redundant and we didn't need to have to think about. And so that was my first flow. Things like reminding me to submit expense reports on a weekly basis. Just things for myself or I used planner a lot. And so I would have power automate go and take all of my planner tasks that we'll do within the next three days and send me an email with the status of them. So I could be like, oh, I need to go check on this, et cetera, et cetera. So small things like that. But then there are larger solutions like our safety team at my old job didn't have a way of doing like adverse event reporting before there was a global app that ended up coming in, but it was like a SharePoint list and people would just submit their things. It was connected to a SharePoint 2010 workflow. It sent one email. But talking to them, they're like, well, what we have to do is when a person submits this event, we get the one email, we then have to go make templates of investigational reports and rename them and send them to the person and their manager and, and, and right. And then they'd have to do a manual follow-up. So I just wrote a flow that took care of all of that. That when somebody submitted it, it went ahead and created all these templates, renamed them, added people to a SharePoint list as a status log. So that the only time that the safety team had to get involved was when either the person hadn't filled out their paperwork in seven days and it went over doing the status list. Or when the person had filled out their paperwork, they would get an approval adaptive card in their email that all that had all the documentation linked there. They just need to click on the link, fill out the paperwork and click complete in the adaptive card. And then it would send a message to that safety team and saying, hey, Alex Jones has completed their, you know, investigation form. And then they would go and say, okay, we're going to go set up an investigation. So then that way they didn't have to be involved, anything upstream of if the paperwork wasn't finished, they didn't need to have a hand in it. And it took a lot of work off of, off of their plate too. And so it caught them up from being like months behind and their stuff because they were, everybody had like their own way of tracking things to just like one central place to do. So start small, I say start very small. And then you can always just build out if you've got a business problem that you can think of, you don't have to think about it all at one time, you can do itty bitty chunks. Like what is, if you know right now how to copy and replace folder names or something, then focus on that and just do it bit by bit by bit. You don't have to do it all at one time. So take a look at templates in the flow, the flow editor, that will also give you an idea of stuff. So you can take something that already exists and utilize that, or you can modify the templates too, which is really nice. So you have a starting point, don't need to build anything completely from scratch and you can just add all the lead steps as necessary. So that's where I can see. Don't think of it as like stealing somebody else's IP here. You're reusing. Yeah. So yeah, that's what it's there for. Yeah, you've got people in the Microsoft community who actually build flows and you can submit them to Microsoft and they will put them here, which I think is a phenomenal way of utilizing more use cases than just, you know, a few like generic ones too. I always like to is that when it shows who the creator was of that, if you use it in a novel way, reach out and let that person know that it's always there. When I hear from people in the community that, hey, I added on to something that you built and something that you did and it's a great way to build connections and as well. Yeah, but I like to use when I find an article or a YouTube video or something, I try to always leave a comment just to say like, thank you for this. This was really helpful. I remember I went for a side client of mine. I was exploring adaptive cards and wanted to there's no action to like send like a reminder to an adaptive card. And I was trying to figure this out and found like this one blog post, just this one that somebody had figured out how to do it. And I tweeted about it and like tagged them in it. And they were like, wow, I don't think I've ever had anybody who's utilized this before at least told me about it. But I think it's a great way to say thank you to the people that help you. I don't make any, I would say YouTube blog content at this point. I do more boot camps and mentoring. But I always, I love being able to give credit where credit is due and just feel like thanks for your contribution because it really does help others in the community. That is an important trait. It's a healthy habit. I think we can all work on and to better develop because I'm trying to, I think about that on a regular basis of making sure, like, am I, you know, attributing, you know, saying thank you and, you know, good job to people that I'm tweeting and I'm doing other things. But I want to also let them know here's why I found this useful and I appreciate what they do for the community. And I mean, it costs you nothing to go and do that just to do that. But yeah, well, as you're really great getting to know you, hopefully we'll get to connect at a future event, maybe an MVP summit one of these days or back to maybe next year. But for folks that want to follow you or find out more about you, one of the best ways to reach you via social. You can reach me on LinkedIn as Jormick Farling. And you can also find me on Twitter. I'm amac underscore and cheese. It'll be me. I'm the only as Jormick Farling there. So I'll be easy to find. So feel free to connect with me on either or. And yeah, see you soon.