 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat. I'm talking today with Patty. Hello. Hi, Christian. Thanks for having me on. So for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? So my name is Patty Byrne. It's a very Irish name, but I grew up just close to Glasgow and that's where I'm based just now as well. I am an elite functional consultant in Dynamics 365. I tend to pivoted between Dynamics 365 Power Platform the last few years, but I keep getting drawn back into the Dynamics side of things, especially customer service and sales. So those customer engagement applications. We're not careful. They might just give you two MVPs or something. There's more and more dual MVPs, because I think we're seeing that happen a lot more of people split between a couple of those areas, writing, doing a ton of activity and there's that internal battle for folks that don't know the Microsoft product teams. They're the ones who say, hey, we want this person. So if you've got two teams kind of vying for you, you could end up with surprise. Hey, a second MVP. I didn't see that this year. There was a few in Europe. There was a few dual awards. And so it was good to see. Well, very cool. So, so, Helen, tell me about kind of your community involvement story. Yeah, so I was always aware that Microsoft MVP community. I suppose I got involved really early. I kind of fell into the job of working with CRM version 4 in 2009. I was actually, I wanted to be a developer and I was working on a dot net support engineer role on the help desk and the help desk somewhere we used was done at CRM 4. And I started messing about customizing it. And then my company sold an implementation of CRM 2011 and they didn't have anything to do it. So I did it and they said, do you have all the training in the world? But I didn't get any of the training in the world. And so I reached out on LinkedIn and my first introduction to the MVP community was Neil Benson. I just reached out for help and said, I need some help on this. And Neil got in touch and this is coming back from 2009. So he kind of got in touch and helped me through things. So I was always aware there was an MVP community there. And I suppose early on my career kind of aspired to be MVP. But I think it's just, you know, it's just kind of toddled along really in my job and kind of working away, doing it really for the money. And then hopefully for selfish reasons. Well, you know, it's fine. It goes without saying, though. I mean, we're all kind of doing the stuff for money. I mean, I'm not aware of any MVPs that are, you know, that like won the lottery and are, you know, don't need to work and they're just doing it for the 100% pleasure. But it's there's value that comes out of it, but it's definitely a different way of working. Absolutely. So that's really what happened then. Six years ago, I started a family with my girlfriend. And we had a really tough time after the birth. The girlfriend had an injury during the straight after the birth. And it was kind of a good three years of tread and water. And my career go over those three years was just remain employed. But over those three years kind of ended. And I got introduced to the community again. Like I said, I was always aware it was there, but never the extent of the side of the community. How large it was. And then I got introduced. It was kind of three events happened. Actually, maybe 24. Three events happened at the same time. My client of mine was moving to work to a Microsoft partner. And I met this woman and she was passionate. She reminded me the passion I had when I started my job. And then I kind of realized that what really happened, I've just been tread and water and, you know, plodding along in this career. I used to be really passionate. And so that kind of got me thinking. And so then Dynamics 365 Plasco happened in 2019. I want to say 2019. Yeah. And I went along to that and then realized there was, I realized the extent of the community. And there was always people, you know, doing what they loved. And I actually did love this work. I was just being kind of like, I said, tread and water, remain employed for so many years. And then I kind of made the decision then that I wasn't doing anything else because of the family and difficult circumstances. I wasn't going to do anything else. So I'm going to kind of make this lifestyle choice. Yeah. And so I just started and again from meeting my client. They could give me a bit of fear because I could spare because the technology had moved on so much. Cause I wasn't doing any active studying or anything like that. And in the power platform was just becoming to gain traction. And so I started studying Canvas apps. And I really wanted to make YouTube videos, but really just to make YouTube videos, not to share knowledge or anything, but I'll learn Canvas apps. And do some YouTube videos on it. I started that. And then I looked at the, the kind of the, the session lists of the Scotch, so the 365 Glasgow that I attended. I just followed everyone's Twitter and then just started engaging with them that way and engaging with the community. And like I said, it became a lifestyle then. Yeah. My YouTube videos gained a lot of traction. I was introduced to Mark Smith. Yeah. Yeah. New Zealand. Yeah. He run a mentoring program that I got involved in, 90 day mentoring challenge. And then, and that kind of, again, like I said, I was using the YouTube channel, that kind of kicked it off. And then I got nominated as an MVP, but I was a very little content or anything like that. I was just, you know, doing my thing and learning. I kind of adopted this kind of, you know, learn, share kind of lifestyle in my spare time. And that kind of gave me a bit of a fright. Cause I'd get really stressed about it. I'd get really frustrated about it. And I was like, wow, I've lost it's fun because then it was, for a few months, I was like, Wow, I've been nominated. I need to do all this extra work. Can I almost take holidays to make YouTube videos and things like that. And that was completely the wrong way to do it. There is some, some degree of, and when I, when I've mentored people, I say this, it's about like developing healthy habits. You have to enjoy it. You have to find your thing. Like I love making videos. I do a ton of video creation. Like I don't have the patience or the time to go make them as beautiful as other people have figured that out. I would love to get some help in doing that, but I continue to do just the more simplistic and put them out there because I enjoy it. I've so I like that's something that you need to people that are interested in and potentially become an MVP need to think about. Do is like what what do I enjoy doing, whether it's writing or or answering questions on forums or creating videos or whatever it is, figuring that out. But then just making time for it. That's probably the hardest thing. Absolutely enjoying it's the biggest part of it. And from when I got nominated the three months following that, I wasn't doing it for the love of it again. I was doing it because I felt I had to get this. So I almost seen it as an as an accreditation or a certification, which is not and it was having chat with someone else that I know in the community. And they kind of they kind of made me think it's not, you know, it's not a certification. It's an award for the work that you're doing and that kind of just kind of woke me up and then I kind of decided that I don't need to do all this extra work. I'm not this is becoming a chore. So I stepped back and and you know, my nomination is still active and but I just kind of left it and dropped it. Not didn't drop them. Just did things when I wanted to do things with when I enjoyed doing them. And then I was I want to give back. So remember right back to my kind of start of my career and new helping me out. And I was thinking what what how people help me out and with the energy to help me out or the Microsoft to help me out. And they really helped me out during that that good few years when I was struggling and so I can help people who are struggling to get to events. And I struggled to learn how to plan because I had to just learn on on my own sitting in the room. I'm sitting in now and watching YouTube videos, learning all stuff. I thought it'd be easier if someone could offer night classes or training courses on this. And that's maybe what I do to to pay it forward as I promised Max I would do. And so I ran the idea past Mark and I did a podcast with him and and that's I spoke about this. I'd really want to start some sort of, you know, a night virtual night class after hours for say single parents or people who just can't get to events or his work won't pay to get to events. And there was a group of people based in Scotland who were who were listening to the podcast and who invited me to. They were starting up a user group. And so they invited me along called the Virtual Power Group of Scotland. They invited me along and said, if you want to do the night classes, there's a stage for you to do the night classes on. And they just gave me a license to the teams event. This is before the pandemic and just a couple of months before the pandemic and and so I started doing these kind of power platform classes. And the selfish, selfish reason for doing them was I wanted to improve my training and my presentation skills. So I picked something that I knew from beginners and so I didn't need to learn any new technology or anything. I just trained people and and then unselfishly the whole thing was to give back and help people that were in my position a few years previously who couldn't and didn't have time just to personal circumstances to study. So I thought I'd do that. And then, of course, COVID came and our virtual user health and everything was virtual and it went from kind of, you know, eight members to 400 members within a few months. And I got more and more involved in the admin of that. So we're just running. I wasn't just one of my classes. I was running and organizing and hosting other sessions and booking virtual speakers and everything that came along with that. And I'm running over two years and now it's, it's still going just now. We're kind of, we've lost a bit of traction at the moment because of it. I just, I just thought to the head of thought, too, it's kind of like you. They talk about, you know, pandemic babies, you know, that we got like some, some folks that are like pandemic MVPs because you just renewed for the first time, right? So you're a two-time or so? Yes, I'm two-time now. So this is my second one. This is my first renewal. Right. So, so within that cycle, because I've had a couple of conversations with a couple newer MVPs that are a little freaked out about now the in-person event starting up again and doing some other things beyond pure virtual. And so it'll be interesting to see, you know, talking with you and others about how that changes. And I mean, especially with a lot of the, anyway, that was just a thought about pandemic babies. Just wanted to bring that up. But the, so what is going to change around the, how do you see the user group evolving the stuff? Are you seeing less participation in online or? Well, it's, we're still seeing the same, no, not quite the same traction as we get, but I'm speaking to my CPM about the MVP award. One of the things I kind of, you know, held back a little bit before even taking it further because, like I said, the pandemics come to an end, things are starting to open up. I didn't want to try and keep this going. I didn't want to get the award then for it just to, you know, to fill up, to die out. So we kept to go very well. We just kept doing events and we're still getting really, we still got really good attendances right up until recently. We get about kind of 25 people at each virtual event, which is, which is pretty, pretty good. The most we got, I think was 59 at one of them. So almost double that kind of virtual one hour night class. It was a bit daunting trying to control 39 students. And we still get about 25 people attending the event. So it's still, it's still going. It's still popular. We've got a big audience for me, though. I mean, obviously I got my MVP last September and I know this is, I, when I first got the MVP, I was a bit like a rabbit in the headlight. So I didn't really know what to do. I just decided to just shut off a lot of social media and that's why I didn't get back to you so quickly. It's like, I'm not going to go, go mad, just take it easy. Continue just doing what I'm doing with the user grip and see where, see where it takes me. And also for me, I wanted to find out how I can best serve the community as well. And now that I am MVP, so I looked at some of the other, some of the options that you get through from being MVP. Like I started doing a lot of some work with the Imagine Cup judging and things like that. And just the things that I was, the things that I was never really into before, but now I've got the opportunity to, to get involved a bit and try and find. Since you mentioned that, you should probably describe what that is for folks too. The Imagine Cup. Yeah. So the Imagine Cup, so the Imagine Cup and the Imagine Cup junior was I was involved with. Imagine Cup is a competition for students to innovate through technology. That's probably the best way to describe it. They come up with Microsoft technology specifically, has to be a mention of Azure in it. And so they come up with a concept and they build that kind of concept using Microsoft technologies. There's a lot of words and recognitions out of that. And I'm not sure if, if some of those, if we've even found some new MVPs out of that program, but it'd be interesting to go and do the history. Sorry, sorry to interrupt you. Yeah. No, the last one I did was the junior one. So I think I'm right. It's the age group is 13 to 17. And so they were their project that she was using AI for goods. And so you've got these kids, teenagers, who are some of them, it's their first exposure to AI. And Microsoft can give them tools and lessons on how to, you know, how to utilize some of the AI within Microsoft Cloud. And it's really just to, to, for innovation, just to see what ideas come out of them. And some of the, the, the concepts that come out of it is fantastic. And like I said, I've been doing some of the judging and it's just mind blowing. And so I've been doing over the last six months, I've been a bit more of that and finding out. So I've not been doing as much the user group stuff for the night classes, but just trying to find out other things and see other opportunities and see where I fit in. And I think now that I've just been renewed for a second time, I'm going to try and explore a wee bit more of that as well. So I don't think I'd just be doing a user group and the user group will still be there. And I'll still use that as a, as a platform for whatever kind of new projects I come up with. And but I haven't quite decided. I'm going to go to a rebrand as well. Just now I'm going to try and change things about a bit. I've catered for the entry to power platform audience. I think now I want to just mix things up a wee bit and keep it going. I'm interested and maybe look at it from me, my peers. Now I'm a lead functional consultant, like a high end lead. So I'm moving into that solutions, architecture, architect role in that kind of space. So I might do something around learning how to do that. And I'm not sure I'm not quite chosen what the right medium for that is. Or the great channel, whether it's a user group, live sessions or YouTube podcast, or even a big mixture of all, but that's the kind of space I'm looking into. And another thing I'm heavily involved in, I got involved with the Scottish Summit Newspeakers channel. Yep, it's part of my goal of presenting and doing the training was to speak at events. Of course, they were all virtual because of the pandemic. But we got invited by Mark Christy Conway to run a new speakers enablement program for last year's virtual summit and this year's in person summit. And that was hugely successful. And so I've been invited to run the South Coast Summit Newspeakers enablement program as well this year. Very cool. I have to ask you if some of the events that I've helped organize and we made a concerted effort to do the same thing to find new speakers. And we occasionally like we would for doing like SharePoint Saturday events and other community driven events, we would reach out to to the local universities and community colleges and kind of broad invitation out to anybody to come and participate and get the free training and kind of all those things. But it's always a struggle to find people that haven't ever presented that are so freaked out by that prospect of being up in front of a group of people and presenting on something and all of the concerns that they have of like, well, I'm not an expert. It's like, well, none of us are an expert on all things. Like we have depth of knowledge in certain areas, but teach what you know. And it will be remedial for some people and others. They'll think this is like somebody just in created fire. Like it'll be brand new to them. So what what made your that your program successful? How did you find people? Well, the first thing we did and I think because I was quite I was known in the virtual space and the Scottish summit this year was an unpersed event and June was meant to be February. But it was right. And so the the guidelines for new speakers was that you hadn't spoken at an unpersed event. So you could have spoken at a virtual event. And of course, a lot of people were doing that for the first time over the pandemic. And because I was prominent within the virtual space, the there was a lot of people who had grown their confidence over that over those few years, and we're ready to take that next step into speaking at an unpersed event. So we did the way we started off is we just had an interest form. So it wasn't like a call for speakers or anything. We just did a general interest in the new speaker enablement program. We set up those made it clear that it was a first time speaking at an unpersed event. And we got an exact number. We got a lot of interest from from that to involve the program. Some already had spoken, but we still let them be part of the program because we're not going to exclude anybody. They just couldn't get any speakers track. But we almost got too too many new speakers. And so I run a session and I showed explained what being a speaker was. And we explained and just showed them how to register and sessionize because I think that's quite done as well. For me anyway, my first submitted a session and just taking that leap of filling and sessionize, learning how to log in, setting your profile up. Those just excuses that you can procrastinate. I'll do that profile bit tomorrow. So we run a session, just say, this is how you register and encourage people to do that. And then that I think we had, you know, we went from kind of like four submissions to 52 submissions over the last week. Obviously, the deadline, the call for papers and expiring helps as well. But we'd so many that we had to cut down the sessions to 20 minute sessions as opposed to 50 minute sessions to give them a chance really to write the speech. Well, it's just a great length to do a 15, 20 minute presentation if you're brand new to doing that in person, to do like a TED talk, a lightning talk type length. I mean, that that's a fantastic introduction to your first time. It's not long at this. So it's enough for you to have solid content, answer a couple of questions that they come up, but feel confident in your content versus fill up 45 to 60 minutes of content. That's a lot for a first timer. That is absolutely, absolutely. But yeah, it could be a review was going to be successful, but maybe not that successful. Are you doing anything with so you had all those entries? Have you did you reach back out to those people that didn't get selected for it? Are you doing anything with those people that content? And we made sure that most people got got the opportunity to speak because it was a two day event. So it's two days off, full 20 minute sessions. There was was two hour long ones. We did a 50 minute long ones that we did and we haven't reached out to them yet. And I have a think about reaching out to them to do some virtual power group nights and then we speak at the user groups. Right. Now I'm taking action on that yet and we're still making plans for what we're doing when I come forward. But I'm just getting the time really, isn't it? It always is. I mean, so this one stops the other would start an opportunity to start. But I mean, it's always I always hate to turn away, you know, good content like that, you know, finding a format, even even putting together or maybe hosting, I know, just throwing an idea. They're like hosting if those people go and pre-record and having your videos of each of the topics. And you can even add that into the extended catalog of content for the event. Those sessions that are, you know, digital only or something, but just a way of making sure everybody's recognized. Obviously it needs to clear a couple hurdles, be appropriate content, those kinds of things. But absolutely, you know, well, well, Patty, I know we're into time here, but, you know, for folks that want to find out more about you, get in touch with you, what are the best ways to reach you? Basically, it is on LinkedIn. I'm Patty Byrne, B-Y-R-A-N-E on LinkedIn. She's going to find me. Or if you do the LinkedIn URL, forward slash freestyle dynamics. I said I've went to a rebrand recently. So it used to be Freefall 365. It's freestyle dynamics. But you also get me on Twitter, Patty freestyle. So at Patty freestyle. And my website is www.freestyledynamics.com. You'll still get the other Freefall 365, because that's my previous band. But I'm just because I'm changing the content of a bit. Yep. I'm going to start fresh and change things up. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. And of course, I think you're, it sounds like you're a fantastic resource for anybody that's brand new, that is kind of fear of like, how do I get started? Patty is a great person to reach out to connect with to, to kind of find your path. This is becoming an MVP is something that you have a goal towards. And, you know, of course, I say this with every MVP that I interview is like, never be afraid to reach out and connect with the MVPs. We are very friendly people, which is why we're MVPs. So if you find some of you really like their content, you really like, you know, their personality, reach out to them, say, hey, are you interested in being a mentor? Or can you give me advice or what have you? And I think most of us are willing to do all of the above. So reach out. So the thing I will say is that, you know, and the best thing about the community is that you can reach out to any of the MVPs or any of the things, and you can get non-judgmental assistance. And just whether it's tech related or not tech related, you can reach out to any of us and you'll get non-judgmental help. Exactly. Yep. Excellent. Well, Patty, he was great connecting with you. And I hope to see you at the very latest next summer when I'm over in your neighborhood. Yes, get in touch. Yes, I will reach out. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much, Christian.