Mega Apps and Industry Focus: Scaling Enterprise Solutions with Smart Design & AI

Mark Smith: 0:14
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode we'll be focusing on Mega Apps or implementations on the Power Platform what I like to call anchor apps. I've got the pleasure of having a guest on from Weymouth in the United Kingdom. He's a delivery director of Synapse, so let's find out more about that, because it's a recent merger that's gone ahead. You can find links to his bio, social media etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Charlie.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 1:00
Thank you for having me Very excited to be here.

Mark Smith: 1:03
Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. We've done a recording before, of course, with you on the MVP show because you're a world-recognized MVP and massive contributor in the community forums with Microsoft, as well as doing a lot of stuff around their onboarding program into the Power Platform community. So this is a thing called Power Up. And then there's the user group, of course that you run, the Scottish user group, which is just epic, where you're pretty much all over the globe in what you're doing and the impact you're having in the community. But today I'm going to focus on this. You know where you've seen large implementations, but before we get started, tell us a bit about you, something we don't know about Charlie.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 1:49
Something you don't know. Okay, that's a good one. I have a real big passion for cars, so I've always loved anything petrolhead, anything that will get my adrenaline going. So sports bikes, uh fast cars nice. But I've had to uh slow down over the recent years because of the amount of driving convictions I have managed to rack up is that right?

Mark Smith: 2:13
yeah, listen, you can always move countries I have considered that yeah, I lost my license in new zealand for speeding. Oh wow, many times. Um, at that time I had a m3 bmw and I had a heavy foot that's what I've got currently.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 2:30
I've got a stage two uh, bmw m3 f80, yeah. So, yeah, I know what it's like, yeah and so I left.

Mark Smith: 2:38
I went and moved to Australia and my dad goes oh listen, got a letter in the post saying that your license has been revoked. I'm like I don't care.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 2:46
I've got a license in.

Mark Smith: 2:47
Australia. Now I'm like I'm off to the races of different countries. They recognize it. Tell us a bit about your company and who you were before the merger, and just tell us a bit about the focus of the organization.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 3:04
Yeah, okay. So before the merger I was the co-founder of zaptica, which essentially was just two of us starting out a power platform, consultancy. Um, then nine months went by and we got given an offer that we couldn't refuse from a company called Synapse. So now I'm the delivery director of Synapse. I look after all the delivery implementations. We are a cross-functional team. We have about 35 members of staff at the moment. 15 of those staff are based in India, in Bangalore. We are opening an office in November and we have the rest of us in London, in central London, in Barbican. So two offices, cross-functional team, and we have big plans to expand into USA and UAE this year.

Mark Smith: 3:57
Wow.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 3:57
So yeah, very exciting times.

Mark Smith: 4:01
This is epic and, of course, straight away there's a bunch of questions I have, so let's just actually tap into a few of them and then let's talk about some of these big projects and why I'm kind of doing this focus series for a bit on mega implementations on the Power Platform Nine months, I assume you know how to sell.

Mark Smith: 4:20
Yes, right, yeah, we weren't planning on selling that quick, to be honest, no, I mean you know how to sell from not your company, but how to onboard customers, because nobody acquires another company that doesn't actually have a pipeline in place and you know customers on board it. How did you tell us a bit about how you landed those customers in the first nine months, how you grew your pipeline from a standing start?

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 4:49
Yeah, so we were lucky in the sense that a lot of previous clients that we had ever worked with throughout our industry experience so you know, throughout my career and throughout my co-founder's career seeing that we went out on our own and they still had requirements and they still needed Power Platform creators, and the difference was we had the low-code capabilities but we also had the pro code capabilities. So a lot of pre-existing clients I had worked out, I worked with, had reached out, some of them being very large enterprise clients. Um, for example, the third largest construction company in the world was on our books within the sort of first two months, which for us, was massive. We landed out super quickly. And then it was about early on.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 5:48
We realized that the one thing we can do to invest and improve is invest in marketing. So we invested quickly into marketing. So we took on someone straight away and, as you know, typically marketing is non-chargeable resources. So we took on someone straight away and, as you know, typically marketing is non chargeable resources. So we put that extra layer of hard work onto ourselves and said, right, we now need to make ourselves even extra chargeable. However, we're investing and we know what we want to target and then for us to sell, we came up with a strategy that we were only going to target the two industries that we were getting the clients from, so for us it was legal and construction.

Mark Smith: 6:22
Golden, golden Key there. If you're listening, focus right, focused on the industry sector. Rather than you know, I see so many Dynamics 365 and Power Platform partners that, oh, we'll do anything, we'll do anything for anybody, you know. And of course, that broadness makes it difficult to stand out. Just on your marketing there's an old adage in marketing 50% works, obviously, and 50% doesn't. Yes, what worked? What worked from your marketing?

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 6:51
What worked? That's a good question. So what didn't work was going straight into sponsored ads, because we weren't in a position where we understood the target market.

Mark Smith: 7:02
Are you talking about, like Google ads or magazines or what?

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 7:05
Yeah. So Google ads and LinkedIn ads both of them we were trialing a lot but some were landing, but the majority were just hitting nothing. So what we realized is actually we need to hone this down. We need to actually focus on what we want to target in order to get the lead gen. So we went too wide too quickly and went try to go too big. So it came back to what you just hit on that and the nail you hit on the head, which is the focus. So then we said, okay, we know we want to focus on construction and we know we want to focus on construction and we know we want to focus on legal. At the time we were finding common problems in those industries that we could solve with Power Platform and that we were regularly being asked for. So then we went after those leads and that's where we started landing success.

Mark Smith: 7:54
Nice, nice, brilliant, brilliant. I love that there's so much more about the business side. It would be good to discuss it at some point. But I want to talk about Megareps. This came about because of an observation I made in a very large customer, which was the kind of starting point of my thinking in this space. They had 44,000 premium seats of the Power Platform, so they're a big company, it was a global company and at the end of their EA agreement they had 600 users, active users, and when I drilled into it and working with this organization, they had very much been sold that the citizen developer story.

Mark Smith: 8:38
Anybody can build a solution on the power platform. You know, the cleaner can do it, the receptionist can do it, anybody can do it. And in an organization that size, the CIO or CTO will consult with their senior technical leadership, which is generally an enterprise architect or a team of enterprise architects. And so they were asked power platform Should it be a strategic platform of the organization? And the result was hard no. If anybody can build on it. Where's the rigor in that? Where's the ALM in that? Where's the testing? Where's the structured? We're an enterprise organization. If anybody can build on this, this sounds like it's just Excel in the cloud and if anybody can build on it, there's no way that we're going to build enterprise apps on excel. Which is kind of funny, because the amount of times you go into organizations that have mission critical tools that are built on excel yeah, but they generally happen by accident.

Mark Smith: 9:41
That was the tool that was used was never intended, that it became the main tool. You know, I worked for a bank for a while not in the tech area, actually worked in the bank earlier in my career and Excel was the main tool. You had to get the updated Excel that was deployed overnight for all loan authorization and it was all done in the spreadsheet. And if you had screwed up and got the wrong one, that would create a whole loop of processes because you did the calcs on the wrong sheet right, which is crazy, but this happens in organizations. So these enterprise architects you know to their executive leadership said no way will we use that as a strategic platform.

Mark Smith: 10:20
And one of the things that we had done in the organization is run an innovation challenge to look at all the kind of use cases that could be built on the power platform. 69 ideas came out of potential ways of using the power platform. It put a red line through about 60 of those because the use cases were enterprise and we are not going to use the power platform to do enterprise. And I was like what the hell? Because my 20-year career had been built on taking started with MSCRM before it was even called Dynamics, then Dynamics 365. And the number of CRM implementations I've done in my career I can count on one hand, but the amount of enterprise deployments I had done was cutting the head off the customer relationship piece and building something else you know on this platform. And we'd asked Microsoft for years for like a headless SKU. We didn't want Dynamics. Give us the model-driven capabilities and let us just build enterprise apps for organizations. So when the Power Platform came about, I was excited, right, because finally we get this dataverse. It's headless, we don't have to worry about dynamic SKUs and we can build anything at the equivalent quality and scale of a Dynamics product which, of course, had proven themselves in market.

Mark Smith: 11:38
The problem was that Microsoft sellers themselves were just peddling citizen dev stories and those Microsoft sellers were X, oraclealesforce, all that type of stuff. It never had the legacy or history that I had and I'm like you're selling the wrong thing. Yeah To an enterprise. That's not the story. They don't want Susie in accounting building an app for the organization. That's not her job. She's in accounting, she's doing her accounting job, or whatever it was you know. And so I felt that then, you know, come renewal time, of course, what does a big organization do that have got that size of seats? And then, you know, I went on to another project that had 230,000 premium licenses, which was in Germany, and I was like you know what? It's just a matter of time that they're going to be three years later and they're not going to see them being consumed. And so the consumption piece is such an important thing to get right if you're going to keep renewing and growing the potential, because that 230,000 seats are 320,000 employees. So somebody missed 100,000 seats there in the sale.

Mark Smith: 12:50
But anyhow, that aside, I felt that the story has been so over-indexed in citizen dev that the enterprise play has not been talked about enough. And listen, they're out there Like there's a lot, but it's kind of like Microsoft or whatever is a Microsoft. Marketing didn't focus on that story, wrongly or rightly. I mean it's very successful. We've got $4 billion per quarter type business now for Microsoft and that's a massive step up from when I started 20 years ago, because the joke in Microsoft was the Dynamics team. All they did was provide enough money for the barbecue at the end of the year, as in. That's their contribution to Microsoft. They were a rounding error inside Microsoft, but at $4 billion a quarter now they're a big deal inside Microsoft.

Mark Smith: 13:35
But I am concerned there's not enough talk about the enterprise nature of the Power Platform and that you can build big mission-critical and mission-critical can mean so many different things for different of the power platform and that you can build big mission critical and mission critical can mean so many different things for different organizations. So you know a couple of people better on the show. One was a passport system for all of New Zealand, so only 600 internal users but 5 million people access it through power pages. Right, yeah, it's critical. You know I did projects in australia on border force, border protection etc. Which intercepts over 30 million packages coming across the international borders, um, or run on a power app right end to end um, management of the roading infrastructure of the entire, uh, west australia, which is 11 times the size of the united kingdom. Oh, but you know on this.

Mark Smith: 14:27
But these stories are not being told anymore and so I wanted to reach out across the community. And of course, we've had network rail. Now come on in the uk. Um, uh, and a range of others um, you know that I've got interviews underway with that are doing big, big things on the power platform. So that brought me to you. What's your story? How do you answer this story? How would you address it, how would you tackle it, and what examples do you have?

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 14:52
No, it's something that I come across all the time, mainly from my clients, when I'm selling them this thing called Power Platform. What's Power Platform? And then you know the classic Microsoft marketing and the messaging is it's a low-code tool that anyone could do so. As soon as they hear that, they think, okay, that's not for us, because we're big players in this space, we're cutting edge technology. Um, no, we need, you know, disaster recovery. We need you know this is mission critical. So I face these conversations all the time. Um, you know, it was actually only last week I was having a conversation with an insurance broker. Um, we're building them out a mission critical application for them that basically their entire business runs on um and it analyzes the different insurance brokers. Uh, it helps them identify any what they call breaches or referrals. And one of the first questions was like yeah, but what are you going to do about disaster recovery? It helps them identify any what they call breaches or referrals. And one of the first questions was like yeah, but what are you going to do about disaster recovery? And you know it was helping them understand that Power Platform is treated like any other service. You know you have environments, you have regions, you have backup regions. It's the same as you building something and hosting it in Azure, and I actually had to go and get that in writing from Microsoft around their disaster recovery just to get their buy-in. So it's quite common.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 16:14
I'm having these conversations, and a lot of the time where I'm having conversations there's around fear of accessibility and performance, which is obviously what I hone in on a lot and I discuss a lot um, and that can mean not large volumes of people accessing the applications, but sometimes large volumes of data into the applications and how do you handle that? So I've got two case studies I would like to talk about today. One is a good number of users and one is a good volume of data. So I'll start with the smaller one, which is actually there's not that many users. It's a law firm, about 100 employees.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 16:55
However, for them it's mission critical. They have used the same case management system for the last 20 years. The reason they need to move is because their database, where all their data for the last 20 years is stored on, is no longer supported, so they have to move is because their database, where all their data for the last 20 years is stored on, is no longer supported. So they have to move. So they were looking at off-the-shelf products and I sold them their return on investment by going bespoke using Power Platform. Now one of their biggest concerns is actually the volume of data. They've got 20 years worth of legal cases and you can imagine how many clients, how many client matters they have covered. And they need all that history and they need to be able to do lookups and they need to be able to cross-reference.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 17:33
So their biggest concern was actually how am I going to be loading 20, 30, 40, 000 rows of data into power apps? You know you can only do 500 rows. You can only do 2 000 rows. You know how is this achievable. So what?

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 17:46
This probably leads me on to one of my newest favorite features of power apps, which is actually being able to execute sql store procedures directly from power apps. Um, I've used it in particular for pagination, so loading mass data. You wouldn't even know you. You're clicking the next page and that data is there in front of you and I'm loading 20,000, 30,000 rows of data, but paginated. So it's possible. It's one of my favorite features, probably for me. It makes me choose SQL for large implementations over Dataverse. I know some people will be like pulling their hair out. Dataverse is the way forward. For me, it's SQL. Don't get me wrong. I've built plenty of applications using Dataverse, but SQL. You've got the store procedures. You've got the views, which for me are 10 times better and more performant with the complex calculations that you can do, the lookups and the views. So for them it was all about we spend 97% of our time in this application and actually we want to make it 100% of our time. So we want you to also build this power, but also to be part of a custom plugin into outlook. So, whether I'm in apps or whether I'm in outlook, I've got the data there.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 19:12
I don't have to switch because you're dealing with solicitors who aren't very good with tech. I remember my mother-in-law is a director of solicitors and I remember she phoned me up in covid. You know I'm I'm meant to be on court. Um, you know it's a virtual court case. I need your help and I went there and I literally unmuted her teams and she was like you're a star. So you know that's the level of tech I'm dealing with. So it's quite funny because then you've got to think about your users.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 19:40
But for them, they're a multi-million pound company and and if this system goes down for one day, it's detrimental to their business. Now, they are only a small business, but the reason I talk about it and mention it is because of the volume of data that we are loading, which is very performant and consistent against the UI and UX experience that they require and desire. Yeah, it then leads me on to my second case, which is actually around. So it's for the third largest construction company in the world, skanska. So originally, skanska, uk approached us and they have, as you can imagine, multiple projects, multi-million pound projects. Um, some of the biggest railways they've built, some of the biggest bridges, schools, you name it, they've, they've done it. You only have to look them up to realize how large they are.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 20:32
And they approached us and said we've got no way in our business of sharing our learning, sharing our findings. Every single project is reinvent the wheel. We want to build this global application which becomes a central hub. Um, we want mass data being uploaded. We want to upload videos if we're on site and you know we've, we've learned something. We want to share that learning. We want it to be quick to upload. So we want ai. So they wanted automatic transcripts, automatic thumbnail. You can imagine they wanted whistles, everything.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 21:09
And I said, yeah, it's achievable. And they were like, yeah, what technology are you using? And when I was speaking with their enterprise architects, they were shocked that I was even considering a Canvas app as the front end. What do you mean you're going to do? A Canvas app that's not performing, that's not achievable. So they already had a large volume of data, but they didn't know what to do with it. Now this data sat in sql so fine. I was happy. I was already happy, as you can imagine. So I was asking them, I sat them down and I said what's your concerns around power apps? Um, so the first was disaster recovery. So we covered that off quite quickly, quite easily, with documentation in email from microsoft. Yeah, and then it was around.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 21:55
Well, within scansca we have our own internal accessibility team. You know this will have to go through accessibility it. You can't build it in that way. You know it has to be keyboard friendly, it has to be tab controlled, it has to be um able to be used for people with visual impairments. So screen readers and everything they were listing. I was like yeah, was like, yeah, we can do that. Yeah, we can do that.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 22:18
There was one feature that they mentioned that we didn't have, but we built, so they wanted it to be used using the dyslexic font. So there's a dyslexic font that you can use to help people with dyslexia understand the application. So what we actually did was build a PCF control which actually meant that you could flick on dyslexic font and it would change all the font in the canvas app. We actually released that to the community for free because we recognize that it's a pcf control that people might use. Now we were already on premium capacity, so the only cost we would eat was the development cost and we could charge back to them if we wanted. We chose that. Actually, that was something that we wanted to widely use across our clients, so we chose not to charge for it, so we could keep the IP for that element.

Mark Smith: 23:03
Nice.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 23:04
And then we covered off the accessibility with the accessibility team and the next question was there's no way you're going to be able to handle this volume of data and where are you storing this data? We're not storing these videos in Dataverse or SharePoint and we store them in Blob. Then they had the barrier of you can't upload videos. You've got a limitation of 20 megabytes in your upload attachment file. That's not a problem. We're pro code developers as well. So we built a custom PCF control that allowed you to upload larger files directly into blob storage. So everything they came at us we had a solution, whether that was we had to go custom code and build out pcf control. I think for this particular solution I'm not gonna lie there was four or five custom controls, and that was more around, because they had particular areas of concerns around UI, ux, which wasn't out of the box, or, as I said, there was sort of storage or data restrictions with the standard control.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 24:10
And then we sort of went through a pilot phase and they couldn't understand how they were going to control the access to this application. You know we're focusing on the uk. Uk is 9 000 employees accessing this app at one point. What happens when we go global and we hit 66 000 employees. So I'm saying how? You know where does this data sit? We need to think about the bigger picture. We don't want to just build it for the uk. If you're going to go global, we have to think global now. We have to think about the bigger picture. We don't want to just build it for the UK. If you're going to go global, we have to think global now. We have to think about the bigger picture. It changes the design. It might change the architecture. You know I'm not going to teach you how to suck eggs. You've been there and most enterprise architects have been there. But you always think about the bigger picture and the scalability. So there were some really interesting discussions. They couldn't come to a conclusion on who in their business was going to own the data, and we actually found that that was our biggest challenge because it was any regulations that might happen between, for example, their German entity and their UK entity, or you know what they do in Sweden versus what they do in the States.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 25:19
So I would say, actually, the fundamental barriers that we have faced, in my experience, when building enterprise or global solutions or large data solutions, is not around the technology itself. I've managed to tackle every barrier, whether it's accessibility, whether it's performance, whether it's whether it's accessibility, whether it's performance, whether it's file uploading all through power platform and some custom code. But power platform supports that which, you know, people seem to forget. It was actually around the processes of getting there who's gonna? Who's gonna look after the change management and the adoption piece. That was massive.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 25:56
You know, how are people going to change their ways of working to adopt this app? Charlie, you can build the best app possible, but if no one uses it, it's no good. You've hit it down the head. That's all about adoption, change management. Then you've got to consider okay, well, you need a maintenance team going forward. We want you to build it because you're the experts, but we don't want to pay you to maintain it for 20, 30 years. So how are we going to build our capabilities in-house? So, actually, all the fires that I was fighting weren't because of the tech, because of the implementations we were able to put in. It was all around the backend processes. But to this day, I am still having discussions with people who try to challenge me and say you can't build that. Oh, model-driven apps, that's too much data for Canvas apps. Oh, canvas apps too long. You know why? Are we not building a NET application? So these are all the challenges that I face, I would probably say on a weekly basis, if not biweekly.

Mark Smith: 26:55
Yeah, yeah, so I take it. You handled particularly the data sovereignty piece of you know what data centers. Where would it sit based on the country's data sets? What's the legislation, et cetera, and you created was it a multi-geography tenant environment?

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 27:44
Correct With role-based access, which, for them, was a massive implementation, right, because they hadn't had any other application like this at SAC. Globally, it was like they were separate companies, and this was one of the problems that we identified Every entity were building their own things and not communicating with one another. But, yeah, as you said, global tenancy we also had to do is why I laughed when you said about the seats of, you know, perhaps, licensing. We had to do a review of all their licensing, because they didn't even realize what they had, and you know some of them all had, like, premium licensing, but they didn't need necessarily premium. They needed per user. You know how it's split per user per plan. Now Microsoft have called it premium, but they had no licensing review done. So they had all these licensing, and you know we tried to bring them on this journey and it it took two years, and they actually tried it previously twice and failed twice. So we were their last hope and last chance, and, luckily, to this day, it's live, yeah, which is awesome, I'd say. The other challenge to touch upon, though, is UX and UI, and it's an uncovered thing, right, and the reason I say that is because trying to get design authority from a global enterprise or mission critical business can be a challenge in itself.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 29:19
So you know, there was times where people were just thinking of this as any type of application. So I you know, I had scenarios where they said, oh, I want it like this. And I said, you can have it like that or you can have it like this. This is out of the box. This is a bit of custom code, this you pay extra for, this you don't pay anything for, and this particular organization, nine times out of ten, went no, I want this, build me this. I don't care about the money, I'll pay.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 29:48
So that was something I found very interesting compared to small, medium businesses, they're always about cost saving. Oh yeah, I'll have that drop down or I'll have that gallery view or that calendar, especially as this was built prior to the modern controls. So they wanted modern feels of controls, which you know meant some elements of it were custom built. I would say. The other thing is we actually brought in an external ui ux designer specifically to focus on the user story and the experience, because, yes, we are great at development, understanding the business requirements, but I also appreciate there's many different skill sets that you need to include into these enterprise applications. It's not one person can do it all. There's elements that I'm very good at and there's elements that I wouldn't touch because I'd put someone else in that position, because they're better.

Mark Smith: 30:44
So you have to be an open, honest team when you're approaching this I think, um, it is so important what you just said there about you bought in a ux ui designer. I think that a lot of projects are nowhere near as good as what they could be because they have failed on that role. And that role is not necessarily a PowerApp developer right, it's not necessary. It is somebody that understands it. And you know, I've had the pleasure of having folks on my team that come from that skill set and they had no problem understanding the constraints of the technology and then able to create just absolute.

Mark Smith: 31:27
I like works of art, like things that looked attractive to me, and one of the the things I've said for years is if we can make gaming addictive, why can't we make a business app addictive? Right? Why do we have to force people to use business tech Generally? Because it's the UI UX sucks so badly that people don't enjoy working with it. Right, it's not stimulating to them. And it can be made so if you just come at it from a different lens, a different view and a different way of. The problem is, most business apps are built by highly technical people that don't necessarily have that skill set in their mix.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 32:03
I love how you touched on what I call the gamification, because that was the success to the adoption for this app. So we had trending pages, so things that were trending. We had likes, shares, reposts, all of this functionality and the business were rewarding people for top content creators, top-liked posts, and that was what caused the adoption and the change management aspect. And we personally would not have got there if I didn't use a UI UX person to understand that element. So every application I'm building, enterprise medium size, we're always bringing in those resources. We've got those resources in-house now but prior to being a smaller team, it would have to be external, but it's very important. And the other thing is, for this global enterprise, client security was massive. So because we I touched upon it, but we built about five custom code controls, our application still had to go through penetration testing.

Mark Smith: 33:12
Yeah.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 33:14
Which is critical right for a business, because if there's any way to exploit it or get data, then you failed yeah.

Mark Smith: 33:22
Did you work with Microsoft on the pen test?

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 33:24
No, Skanska had their own third-party pen testing team that they utilized. So, yeah, it was all third-party and then they generated the reports.

Mark Smith: 33:33
Great.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 33:35
So, yeah, it was good for me to go through that experience and see how Power Apps.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 33:40
It was my first time experiencing Power Apps being pen tested and you know our JavaScript, c Sharp, that sort of stuff being pen tested. I was like, oh, this is. You know, they're scrutinizing the code. And then I would say the other challenge for anyone thinking about right, I've got this really cool client. They've asked me for this massive implementation.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 34:01
Don't underestimate them in the sense. Don't underestimate them in the sense. Don't underestimate the documentation that you're going to have to provide. Don't underestimate the upfront work you're going to have to do. Don't underestimate the amount of testing, the different testing you might have to do. I mentioned how we had to do accessibility testing. We had to do penetration testing, what we actually did before we even did any development. We had those UI diagrams, wireframing, built out in Figma, where it was an actual journey where you could click through and it was like you're in the application. So we were testing with the end users before we even built anything. So we were getting early feedback and it was great. We actually did in-person workshops to say what you like, what don't you like, and it challenges the business to think in different ways.

Mark Smith: 34:44
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Figma.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 34:47
Love it.

Mark Smith: 34:48
It's just an amazing, amazing tool, right.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 34:50
It's my favorite. It's all we use for wireframing.

Mark Smith: 34:54
Yeah, yeah, once again, I think every Microsoft partner in this space, every I'm not saying, if you're a consultant, that you need to know Figma, but boy, you should have you know. I say everyone needs level 100, 200 type understanding, because then you'll know where to bring in the expert, where to bring in somebody that knows Figma and how you can produce an app in Figma. And this is what I love is that I feel in recent times the need to demo has dropped so much and replaced with the need to prototype, and what figma gives you is a prototyping tool without necessarily having to go into the, the realms of demo. Yeah and um, figma experts, man, what they can do is just mind-blowingly epic. And you wouldn't know side by side whether it's figma or showing you, whether it's a power up or showing you.

Mark Smith: 35:42
In fact, I do a presentation on it and I show the Figma drawings and I was like, wow, isn't that? And they're like, yeah, it's all nice Figma. I'm like, okay, now let me open the app. And they open the app and they're like, oh my gosh, it looks identical to the Figma. I'm like, yep, and that's the so good.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 35:59
And of course it is we, we do that a lot and I love that part of the journey because I can't tell you how much money that has personally saved me and any other business I've worked for in the past because it's the most critical stage, because not only are you giving the client the look and feel, but the clients I typically work with they don't know what they want until you provide them something. And then they realize what's possible.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 36:23
And then they want the world and you're like whoa, hold up, you know scope, creep and all of this so yeah, that aspect of the software development life cycle is so critical and I think the reason the number one reason that people fail with power Apps implementations for enterprise clients is because they don't consider Power Apps, as they have to treat it like a software development lifecycle, so they don't do all these things that they should be doing, like what we've discussed, from gathering requirements all the way to deployment and then iterations.

Mark Smith: 37:02
I love it. Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Charlie Phipps-Bennett: 37:07
You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Mark Smith: 37:10
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.