 Everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Angeliki. Hello. Hi, Christian. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you. And for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? So, my name is Angeliki Patsyamu. I'm a Senior Change Management Consultant with Avanade. And I am based out of London, UK, however originally Greek-Italian. Excellent. And so this is an interesting space. I mean, so a lot about going into your bio, it's like it's a lot of what I focused on a lot of my career. So I'm always interested in kind of the side topics there. So like what does that actually mean? You focus on change management in your role. What does that actually look like? Great question. So I look after adoption of new systems, new technologies, new processes, you name it. Very much the people side of change. So I work alongside development teams that deliver other new solutions or new products to make sure that the business gets the money's worth by making adoption a successful milestone and part of the process. You know, historically, so this is the portion of the funding where companies say is like, do we need that? People understand the technology, they just get it. They don't need this kind of help for change. So you and I, I mean, we know our experience is that, you know, that that is the fundamental flaw. You can have a perfectly designed solution. And if people don't use it, it has failed and you've spent a lot of money. And so companies need to, it's like training. What's the first thing that happens in a market downturn? They cut the training. They cut the adoption services. And then they wonder why they struggle with productivity, they struggle with a lot of their deployments. Absolutely. And I'm really glad you mentioned it because there's such a misalignment in the industry. So it's not specific to a company or a client. It's actually something the industry faces. So change management or business readiness, however you want to name it, is seen as a nice to have sometimes or even a luxury when there's budget constraints. And also as an end product that you look into at the 11th hour, however, to do it right, to do it for the benefit of the customer, you actually integrate organically throughout the development process and throughout the life cycle of your solution, which means that by the end of it, it becomes an organic stage. And this is where also the industry gets it wrong. It doesn't view it as something organic that is part of the development life cycle. It becomes a separate nice to have stage. And that separation and working in silence is what's really harms implementations. Do you have to do a lot of selling to convince customers that it has to be this integrated? Did they try to remove it from solutions that your company deploys? Sometimes, sometimes it's education for specific clients, specific industries, also internally when you get involved in a big project. So it's very important to go early on and say, this is a pre-sales conversation. It's not just about later down the project, but also explain what are the benefits as well as what are the risks? The reality is whether the consultants are doing it internally or someone else, it has to be done. So it's very simple to go back and have a conversation around, I understand your concerns are on budget or this particular activity. How are you going to do it? And once you start unpicking it and giving that education back, they have this fresh perspective and they really do understand that if they want to give their solution the best chance to actually be implemented, then they do see that they need to implement it. Yeah, my experience again is the companies that have been through that cycle to see like the differences, like they buy into that. They understand that they're like, oh, yeah, future projects. No, we have to do this. It's essential to the success. And it's those that have cut it every time that don't get it and then feel the pain. But it's one of those things again, it's kind of like a security breach. Most companies don't take action until they've experienced a breach. They've experienced the pain. And it's just unfortunate that more companies don't understand the importance of change management. Sorry, I get soapboxed or whatever. I get up and sound very preachy on this. But so what? So you are brand new MVP, business applications. So let's talk about that. What was your journey to becoming an MVP? So it's been a fantastic whirlwind. It started just over a year ago. So officially May 2022, whereby I started officially speaking in the community, I was involved about a year before, but I was more of a participant and observing and trying to figure out what is the best niche and story to tell. And so I started in the community participating in South Coast Summit, which is in Southampton in the UK, a fantastic opportunity to to get to know the community, but also understand how everything operates. And I got a mentor and a coach early on that really believed that I had a story to say as well. So we started scheming and ultimately came up with the first few up trucks and the year and eventually got picked up to start in May last year. And it's been amazing. I started from never doing any public speaking to three sessions in one month. So it was quite that's a lot of work to create the content around those. But yeah, it is it is. But also to prepare a thing mentally and physically for something as demanding. I went from having never spoken to speaking in front of a crowd of a few like maybe 400 or so people in a massive amphitheater. So that was a lot of pressure. But what I realized that if you have the passion and the energy for it, everything just clicks in the moment. And that was what kept me going. And since then I've been doing a variety of conferences and user groups just to be able to communicate this important messages around building applications that have the right user experience, that have the right personas in place, you know, who you're building for. One of my taglines is built for real users, not senior egos, which is all about building for the actual needs of your users and not just whoever has either the budget or the loudest voice. And there's a lot of found sessions. I think them around movies, so that has definitely kept the community going. Every session is really engaging. And the reality is that it's not specifically about change management. That's a natural topic, but it's about having learned from all the failed implementations as I've been in CRM for the last decade. So I've seen so many implementations and so many different cloud solutions. I worked around four different cloud solutions, Microsoft included. So I really have a lot to say about how things could do better. Yeah, well, it's I also like part of what you said about your your journey of of trying to figure out, you know, messaging as a marketing guy, I mean, messaging and positioning and how you stand out. I mean, that's so critical to to marketing. And to some degree, you know, if you whether you have a formal goal to become an MVP or not, having a strategy for like your personal brand and how that fits with your company and what they're trying to do. And I mean, you work for a company that's very supportive of community and MVPs and you're very lucky that way, as I'm sure you know, I've worked for some that have been supportive and some not so much. And there's definitely have as an appeal to work for a company that supports community, but finding that voice and that message. I always advise people that are starting out like regardless of what else is out there and tell what your personal experiences are. Over time, it sounds like you refined that to find things that were unique. I mean, maybe we can talk about that process because because that's us. I think we are our own biggest editors. We are self editing. And so we don't speak up. We don't share ideas. We don't write things. We don't take action because we think that somebody already kind of did the same thing. So how do you find, yeah. So the first thing is, as I mentioned earlier, observe, observe what's available, what's other, what do people speak about their style? I'm really glad you mentioned the marketing background. I actually have a strong marketing background. So I think it's in my blood to think that way. Getting MVP was a fantastic achievement, but it was never a goal per se. For me, it was just very important to get out there and speak about certain topics that I found were not spoken at all. So by going into conference, I realized early on, I mean, there's amazing, super smart individuals that know all the products, they showcase how they function. But it felt like a very technical community that did not have enough of the sessions around the human impact of technology. And it really is early on, not only how important that gap was, but how passionate I was about that. I think because I have a mixture of having the marketing background and always being the end user, I suffered through all of the bad implementations, but I also suffered by not having an active voice in all of the solutions that were implemented on my behalf and my colleagues' behalf. So I think there was a massive opportunity to talk about democratizing technology. Obviously, we're in the citizen development wave as well, which gives us more power in the era of gen AI and the co-pilot products. So there's so much to say about all of this massive technology and achievements. What are we going to do with that? There's a human impact. There's the moral obligations, the ethical use of technology, and also how to make it fun and engaging. That's also part of adoption, making sure that it has a sustainable impact. So I realize that this was missing, but there was a fun way to do it as well. Another thing that I'm sure you've noticed is that this conference is depending on the duration and the amount of sessions. Sometimes you do have a bit of fatigue. So really early on that I want to do it in my own geeky, but also fun way. So, you know, theming it around movies, memes, all it became quite engaging. And I realized that people saw it as an opportunity to disengage from a little bit of that fatigue. So that's again, part of observing what's out there and what you could do. Well, there, look, if you're going to be on stage doing things that and I think some speakers forget this, there is a certain performance factor to this. You don't want to put people to sleep. You can have fantastic information and be really incredibly boring. And so it's I I like to make an audience laugh and try to build in jokes and stories within that. So it to personalize is that as well as, you know, I could see if people are snoozing on on too much data, too much information, too quickly and need to kind of change the pace a little bit. And so that's it's important to go and do that. But like what you said, too, about, you know, the goal was not the MVP. And I say this a lot in most of the MVPs that I interview about this. Yeah, we we'd all do this regardless of the award. That's it's just part of our personas. It's, you know, I'm passionate about learning and sharing. And and so I would do it regardless of the status. And I think that's a it's an important part in Microsoft. You know, the people that are adding new MVPs, they look for that. They there has to be a certain level of humility at the same time. You have to self promote. You have to get the word out about the things that you're doing. So what what are your kind of promotional? Well, let me ask this. So what are your primary community outputs like video, blogging, speaking kind of all those things and how do you promote those things? Great question as well. Because I think a lot of people are trying to find their journey. They need to make some choices around those. So I I'm primarily a speaker, so this is why I do a lot of events. I really enjoy the in person opportunities, the engagement, the ability to directly interact with the community. And at the same time, I get involved in conferences, well, from an other organizational perspective in terms of, for example, mentoring, I really enjoy that it's about passing it on, right? Creating that legacy the way I've received that mentorship and coaching. I try to pass that on or helping with evaluations, which is actually quite educational because you put yourself into the organizer's shoes and you really appreciate both the hard work, but also the immense effort in goes through the CFP process. So I definitely enjoy that quite as well and helping out. And in terms of channels, of course, social media really helps. So Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth, but also word of mouth, the networking through the in person events. But also word of mouth in terms of the kind of brand you bring together. So one of the things that I've done, which I think is part of the marketing background, everyone should aim for is have certain branding around yourself. So I call myself a human evangelist. You have a lot of tech evangelists around. We talk about product, but you never had a human evangelist, which is all about how do you champion the users behind every solution, the human impact of everything we do. So having that branding really helps with word of mouth and just putting it as part of how you socialize everything you do. Yeah, that's well, again, that's kind of a marketing one on one. It's, you know, having some kind of brand to go and build around. And I mean, if you get to the point in your career where it's just your name and that's enough of a brand, I mean, we have the, you know, we have the Madonna of, you know, each of the different communities. There's people that just say their name and you know what they are, what they stand for, what they focus on. But yeah, until we get to that point, having that clear messaging is optimal. So so as a biz apps MVP, what specifically do you focus on there? What's your technology strength? So my background is in CRM, so Dynamics C, but that quickly evolved into Power Platform as well. There's a massive opportunity, as I was saying earlier, very passionate, not only about the human input, but democratizing the way we use our tools and IT generally. So the Power Platform offers a lot of opportunities around that. So that has also been my recent focus. So it's a mixture of Dynamics C and Power Platform in order to bring that bigger vision together. That being said, there are no far apart anyway. One is built on the other side. It's about bringing those principles around how to build the right applications, how to bring teams together, fusion teams and making sure that this collaboration is going to lead to ultimately adoption being the organic success and not something that is forced and ultimately fails. Yeah, there's the discussion around change management of business applications. The business app service, the Power Platform solutions is a big deal. I'm governance and change management are kind of my two biggest topics. And I'm honestly, I'm surprised still at how few people are out there speaking on these topics, which are so essential to the scalability and supportability of these solutions. I mean, Microsoft went out with their COE, so the Center of Excellence Model, which is just kind of a placeholder, a starting point for organizations. And there's just still a lot of work to be done. And there are certainly vendors like my company that have solutions around that. But it's such an important topic. Is that something that is kind of general, like how to go and build a supportable model around Power Platform? Is that something that you're building a lot of content around or speaking to? This is definitely an important topic. And it's one of the topics that I would like to focus further on. So I'm talking a lot about enabling governance purely because the word governance on its side, it's usually quite a cake, quite scary, and it's not really feeling like a modern workplace. However, as you said, of course, the starter COE kit is great. But it's also about enabling the organization and the different profiles of individuals. We live in an era where technology is extremely fast paced. Obviously, on one hand, we're super excited about announcements that are coming in day in, day out. But at the same time, we've noticed that there's a lot of uncertainty about what it means for individuals, for roles and whole industries. So I think this is the most amazing time as change managers to go out there and create the right kind of environment where we harness this either concerns or this confuses into something that will enable the ecosystem. So you build the right roles, enable the flexibility around structures. So there's some amazing research that Garner has been doing around the role of business technologies, which is how they use the term for citizen developers so that they enable the ecosystem and they are able to harness the power that sits outside of IT department. So in that sense, yes, absolutely. This is actually what I speak about to the point where one of my research and is about how do you create fusion teams within DevOps, which is a little bit different than the usual material because I'm talking purely about DevOps principles. But the idea is fusion teams and building applications is not just within the business space. It should be around traditional development as well. And it's all about enabling that user centred design throughout so that governance is about empowering individuals, not the scary framework that is opposing modernizing and speeding up innovation and scalability. Yeah, look, there's a we could go and we can talk for an hour just on that topic. Absolutely, because I think that there's you know, we have a lot with the citizen development is kind of kind of what you indicate with the fusion teams is kind of bridging the traditional software configuration management, you know, SEM space, you know, the true DevOps space. And I think that there is a lot of change that's going to happen. Certainly, there's a lot that's being done in the Microsoft world around that space. But well, maybe for a future topic, we can we can discuss that. But in the mean time, folks that want to find out more about you, get in touch, where are you most active out in the social networks? Where can people find you? LinkedIn and Twitter, feel free to reach out. My name is a longer name, so it definitely stands out. I mean, a lot of community activities and I love people reaching out and we pick in each other's brain on this topic. So they're more than welcome this week. It's actually a very active week going all out. So tomorrow evening, speaking of the Portland platform user group about how to build resilient applications within the platform. Wednesday, Microsoft 365 user group about how to use the Microsoft 365 solutions around user-centered design and finally collab days in Zurich on Saturday against similar topic, but just different products. And it's just a very exciting week because these are very different audiences. But at the same time, we all have the same energy and interest in the community. Yep. Oh, it's great to have, you know, similar topics across different audiences and compare the feedback and find the exactly, exactly. Well, Angelica, you really appreciate your time today. And of course, you'll be able to find all of our contact information out of the blog as well as out on the YouTube page. So thanks so much for your time. My pleasure, Christian.