 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Heidi. Hello. Hello, Christian. Thanks for having me. It's good to see you again. Of course, I've already seen you this year. So I feel spoiled. It's like we've seen each other more than a couple times a year now. So for folks Heidi that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? Sure. So my name is Heidi Jordan. I am a senior modern workplace consultant with Avanade. And I am out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. So I like to tell people there's not a lot of us in this area, you know? It's pretty lonely. So it's fun to have the tech community, you know, to gravitate towards and see at events and whatnot. So. Well, it's like, yeah. Like where do you are? I mean, this time of year, you basically just, you make sure you have plenty of supplies and. Yeah. Fill up the bathtub. As Liz said in a tweet a couple of weeks ago, you know, we get these big blizzards and you just load up on some food and turn on Netflix and, you know, just hang out. It's beautiful. I've often said for folks that don't, haven't been out to that part of the world. I mean, I love driven through, you know, a dozen times or more, South Dakota. I love the Black Hills, Rushmore is my favorite national monument. It's just, it's just fantastic area out there. And I've often said it's like, I, like I love more rural settings and have me lived in the Sierra Nevada as part of my teenage years. I just, I, it has that same vibe for those that know, like Placerville, South Lake Tahoe, like in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada's, the Black Hills has the same vibe as that. It's like, I could live over there. Nope. See, I'm actually from Minnesota. So I never, I rarely make it out to the Black Hills, even I've lived in South Dakota now for probably 15 years, but I've only been out to the Black Hills like maybe once or twice. I'm actually a Minnesota Lake country girl. So that's, well, it's beautiful out there too. That's what I drove out there two summers ago. So I think COVID going and the dog and I took a road trip and visited my daughter and like every town you roll through, especially I cut across from South Dakota and didn't take the major highways, you know, you know, straight up. I kind of zigzag through, like stop, do all the little town stuff. And every time I'm just like, I could live here. This is beautiful. This is fantastic. But then I remember the winters. Oh, gosh, I know. Yeah, you got to come back in the summer sometime. I feel like when you were here a couple of weeks ago, it was winter and that just wasn't fair. I've been out there again. My daughter's there just up north of Minneapolis. And it's, I mean, yeah, walking along the river and the parks and summers are gorgeous in Minnesota. Yes, for sure. So I always like to ask that question, the origin story question. So you as a relatively new MVP, so still fresh in your mind. What was the, what was your path to becoming the MVP? What was that like for you? Yeah, it was actually a really quick one. I really think we just kind of started those conversations like last year with my mentor kind of going on that track. And, you know, she kind of said it, this isn't really something you seek. It just comes to you, you know, so just really be active with community. Just keep doing what you're doing, be an advocate, be a driving positive force for Microsoft, and then things are just going to happen. So that's really what I went into with that mindset. Well, plus you just started it out by saying that you had a mentor and that's something that look at. And so I'm part of like Microsoft for startups programs. I've always had a formal mentorship relationships at different companies that it was with and inside and outside like career mentors that were not part of my company. And so what are your suggestions there for people that don't have a mentor? I think that you just got to find someone that you gravitate towards, whether that's like on social media or at conferences or something. Just find a person that you're a lot alike. So like I will call out lists on that. I'll mention her all day. She's the best. So she I had met her at a conference or at a SharePoint Saturday and she was a she was into marching band as and so was I in college. So that was just that kind of cool fact, like maybe gravitate towards her. And I really liked her delivery and I just kind of reached out and said, hey, you know, would you mind being my mentor? So I think, again, just find someone that you're kind of close to, find someone in the community, find someone that may be the same technology parallel that you're in or, you know, and just they will most likely say, yes, you know, people in this tech community love to help others. That's kind of what binds us all together. So more than likely someone will be willing to help you out. Well, I have to say, though, the problem I have with with Liz is that like she just doesn't get sarcasm. Right. Yeah, she's not that way at all. I know it's I've got a real problem with that. I tell her that all the time to her face. I'm not shy of that. But Liz is awesome. So hashtag not Tracy. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. She's also very dangerous for crochet needles. So don't get on her bad side. Oh, yeah. No, I know. Whip up those blankets left and right. So yeah. Well, so so what are you focused on now? So business applications, NDP for like. So what is your focus there with business apps? Sure, I think Power Platform is really my, you know, but more as, you know, there's many components to Power Platform. But I kind of gravitate towards the Power Apps and Power Automate. The I really got my start building solutions using InfoPath and SharePoint Designer. So really that whole how do we actually make this work for our business? That's kind of where I gravitate towards helping people actually put those into play in their businesses and understanding those tools and really the evangelization, evangelization side of it, you know, that this this can work for you. And here's how. Where do organizations mainly struggle with Power Platform? Is it like on the governance side? Or is that because I keep hearing that pop up. And of course, my new company, REN Core, we've got a solution. There's other solution providers that are doing things. I was just on a PGI call. So MVP call. So the NDA can't talk about what we talked about, but was kind of focused on aspects of governance of Power Platform. But what are some of the things that companies struggle with as they're starting up? Sure. I think that, you know, it's really we're kind of going through a phase now. So the initial phase was Oh, no, InfoPath is dead. You know, and now what are we going to do? So then everyone was kind of scrambling to see what the next solution was. And so then they started to look into the Power Platform. So it was really that phase was how do we get started? How do we remediate these InfoPath forms? Do we need to go to other tools? You know, just really a discovery phase of trying to see what was out there with the next offering for Microsoft. You know, and now I think that the solutions are out there. Hopefully, unfortunately, a lot of businesses are saying the Wild West, you know, these solutions everywhere. And there are a lot because a lot of third party solutions popped up in the meantime as well. And and while I look, I don't focus on that area, but you don't hear about any one solution out there because Power Platform, the community side, is just really taken off. But you know, and again, the Wild West, like the all these things. And now how do we actually get a handle on that? I think that the the citizen developers in IT are kind of coming together in the middle and they need to figure out a way to actually govern it. And that's why the whole governance thing is really popular right now. You know, the the COE toolkit is a big thing, which I think if you haven't heard of that, you know, that's the it's you can download it and it's a way to you know, how many apps do I have out there? What are you know, what's our utilization? How are people actually adopting this platform? And it gives you those statistics right out of the box. So I think that's kind of a hot topic right now with governance. That's actually another area. I mean, just the whole concept of having a center of excellence. I love that Microsoft came out early with that and promoted that out there. It's free go and check it out. There's a lot that's been written on that topic. But I I mean, I really look at that as Microsoft learned from past tool deployments, other platforms and waiting until late stage to develop some of that, those best practices and provide that that guidance. And so it's great that they did that. So that's always a recommendation. If you you don't know where to start with that, make sure that you go and take a look at the re materials. And there's a way that you can kind of baby step your way into leveraging the COE to keep, you know, at least start down the path of having some semblance of governance in place of what's being built within your organization. For sure. And you can really put it in at any point. You know, you could do it at the beginning. You could do it at the end, like any part of your journey. It's nice that it helps at any phase to give some insight. But it really isn't like me and I'll be all though, you know, it's not the stopping point. Like once you have this installed, like that's not it. You need to know what to do with that. You know, and that's really where people are trying to take the next steps now on what do we do with this? Like once the part platform takes off, you're going to need staff. You're going to need people that know how to support these tickets that are coming in and really keep the platform, you know, keep that under control. Well, and there's there's the life cycle of the solutions as well. So I mean, you can see that you can see the data, but you still didn't have to go take action, make decisions on it. And then you're seeing people that are now seeing more and more. And this is a sorry, this kind of a pet peeve early in the when teams was first rolled out. There's a lot of us in the MVP community that we're pushing to Microsoft and saying, hey, the multi-tenancy issue, it's a major issue. It's a huge gap. And they're like, well, you guys, your special case is a small number of scenarios where that that's the case. And it's become this mainstreamed, you know, problem that's out there and larger organizations in the power platform have this issue where they're looking at, well, how do we transport? How do we move, you know, the life cycle of the solutions? How do we extend this to other parts? If we acquire a company, if we have multi-tenants within a single organization, much less through M&A, we acquire other companies or merge companies and bring them together. And how do we share these things? That's becoming a more and more common scenario. And, you know, it's not just power platform. It's across it's a Microsoft 365 issue. But it's again, Microsoft is starting to recognize, you know, hey, these MVPs that voiced this concern early on, like this is a, yeah, we need to solve these problems. Yep. And you feel like we're entering the, you know, in 2020, it was the whole like the rush to teams in the hybrid workplace and all that. And I feel like everything's have settled down a little bit from that. And now we're really able to refocus and start working on some of these issues, you know, and really growing the technology and seeing all the things that are coming out with FIVA. And, you know, it's just fun to see how we're really broadening our horizons now and getting back to our focus on the tools. I always say this like about sprawl in general is that, you know, the sprawl, it's messy. It's the Wild West. There's cleanup, all those kinds of things. But it's also an indication that people are using the technology. And when people use it, then that kind of begets it. It forces organizations to go and, OK, let's look at the governance process. Look at the life cycle of the, let's look at the content that's being used. Is it being done in the right way? Do we need to mature? Take kind of a, you know, a CMM maturity model approach to these solutions. And and so it's rare that you find a company that is early in the phase that says, hey, we're going to go and adopt these things. Let's go back and look at best practices and see the right way to do these things. No, they jump with both feet in, mess things up, and then they go clean up things later. So I think that's the vast majority. It's a it's a rare instance where somebody wants to go and put all of that in place up front before people are starting building things. Oh, yeah, I've never come across any company that has done that, you know. It's one of those. There's somebody will claim that and then you dig into the story of what they were actually doing. And it's usually it's because they're new to Microsoft Stack or Power Platform, but they had a long history of all the mistakes on some other technology stack. Exactly. I think this drives home the importance of like internal user groups, too. I think that just sharing that message, you know, is people are more likely to listen to each other coworkers than I tell them what to do. So I think that it's the power of an internal user group just to do that show and tell and, you know, maybe people are focused on their own lines of businesses in their departments and they're really focusing on those pieces of the platform and the tools that work for their department. I think it's so powerful. And I highly encourage any business to get that going and, you know, keep maintaining that and let users share with each other. Even if there's I would say because I've had this, I'm sure you've had similar experience, like even if there's just two of you sitting at lunch, having conversations about that, and a lot of user groups, internal user groups might start that way, two or three people getting together. But I remember doing this and consistently meeting together and it got bigger. They were, you know, at the end, they were, you know, consistent participation monthly, 12 to 15 people, sometimes a lot larger than that. But just the sharing of, you know, hey, take a look at this. I found this thing. Were you aware of that? Oh, hey, yeah, I built something similar, but I didn't see that. And kind of those conversations internally where you have that shared interest about the success of the company, it's it's really powerful. It's it you get a lot of help sometimes that's unlooked for in improving the quality of the solutions that you build. These are the people that are using it every day. You know, those are the people you want to talk to and those are the people you want talking to each other really. Right. No, it's a look, I talked about written a lot about community building, but it's you just need to be consistent. You need to be, you know, willing to to be that driver, to be the one that's always showing up that's there every time. And, you know, don't get caught up in the the the fact that, hey, there aren't 30, 40, 50 people at this meeting as a measurement of success. Again, two or three people getting together can help each other and you get value out of out of that. Absolutely. That's one thing that Liz, again, Liz, shout out to Liz. You know, it has said about right when you present at conferences, you know, as long as you reach one person in that room like you did your job, you know, it doesn't matter how many people are in the room. I always say that. So I started my on stage career. I was the lead singer of an alternative rock band in the early 90s. And I would always say that I'm not especially a shy person anyway. But I tell you it occasionally we played a gig where it was us, maybe one person, sometimes they'd walk back to the bar and go to drink. There'd be nobody there. And we just like looking at each other and we're like, hey, it's another practice like we're getting value out of this and being here. But yeah, it's a user group of one, not useful. But again, minimum of two people. You know, it's all you need. It's all you need. So what I heard from that is that you're going to do karaoke at the next no conference or something to karaoke. We always did all original music. So that's yeah. Yeah. Well, good times. Well, what's so what are your kind of your big topics you're focusing on? What are you writing and speaking on right now? Sure. Yeah, I'm working on for the next conference. I'll be in Las Vegas in May. I am doing a new session on Power Automate and six kind of tips to keep your business flowing. So what I'm doing with that is there are in the field I've worked with, you know, building these solutions with Power Apps and Power Automate. There are some concepts that are seemingly easy for, you know, but actually aren't in the long run. So I'm trying to just oversimplify those concepts, things like assign a task to a group, you know, some of those like key things that are actually big parts of your solutions and just kind of going over those and showing users how to do those. So that's one of my sessions. And then the other one, I'm going to do my Power Apps tips from a first time user, where I tell my story of how I actually got started with Power Apps coming from a InfoPath background. And, you know, it took me nine months to build my first form. Like I will be very clear and transparent about that. Like this is not an easy tool to adopt. So I like to point out some of those things that I struggled with in the beginning and just point those out so users can go and just get started on their journey with, you know, a little more smoothly than I did. And I have to ask this question. Are you still supporting any InfoPath solutions out there? Or are you completely recovered? I am me personally, no, I am loving helping people remediate their info pathforms, though, in my current position. So, yes, that's actually one of my favorite projects to work on right now. I was getting those info. I was like to share that. So in the so this is back before the Y2K thing. So in the 90s, so I went to work, I was working for EDS. They tried to recruit me to become a COBOL engineer. And and the reason I didn't do it was because they wanted to send me down to Texas, I was in Northern California for a couple of months and I was newly married and without my wife and my daughter. And I'm like, no, no. So, you know, that was the big decision. Of course, I knew a couple of people that were in that program and continued to be COBOL programmers that made a bank on Y2K and after that, in financial systems, you know, it there's still a thing that's out there. But and I'm sure there are still COBOL programs out there. There's not many of them, so they make a lot of money. And so I like to I don't want to if there's anybody that's out there that's still working on a supporting info path, I think that you're you're what you can be paid to do that for those organizations that are holding on to those pieces, you can probably demand a pretty penny. But exactly. Yeah, same goals for SharePoint Designer. You know, yeah, yeah, there you go. Other side of the coin there was very cool. Well, Heidi, I really appreciate your your time and jumping on this this call, letting people get to know you folks that want to connect with you. What are the best ways to find you out in social? Where are you most active? Twitter or LinkedIn. I'm open for both of those. So, yeah, thank you for having me. Don't be shy. Reach out to Heidi. She's she's friendly. That's right. Yes. Thanks a lot. And we'll see you in Vegas in May. Sounds good. Thanks for having me.