The Business Value Kit: Quantify Value & Return on Investment (ROI)

Transcript

WEBVTT

00:00:01.824 --> 00:00:06.594
Welcome to the co-pilot show where I interview Microsoft staff innovating with AI.

00:00:06.594 --> 00:00:12.913
I hope you will find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology.

00:00:12.913 --> 00:00:15.887
Now let's get on with the show.

00:00:15.887 --> 00:00:20.830
In this episode, we'll be focusing on the Business Value Kit.

00:00:20.830 --> 00:00:24.868
Today's guest is from Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

00:00:24.868 --> 00:00:31.891
He works at Microsoft as a Principal Program Manager for the Customer Advisory Team, or PowerCat, it's known.

00:00:31.891 --> 00:00:35.887
You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode.

00:00:35.887 --> 00:00:37.491
Welcome to the show, steve.

00:00:38.540 --> 00:00:39.423
Thanks very much, Mark.

00:00:39.423 --> 00:00:40.284
How are you doing?

00:00:40.906 --> 00:00:42.591
Good, good, Good to have you on the show.

00:00:42.591 --> 00:01:09.167
I've been waiting probably about six months to get this one recorded, because the business value kit that the Powercat team and the lead on it has produced is a very exciting piece of tooling that allows customers to really understand the value that they get from anything from automating an idea to building an app to you know what is the actual incremental value that has been achieved on their own data sets.

00:01:09.167 --> 00:01:12.524
But before we go there, tell us a bit about food, family and fun.

00:01:12.524 --> 00:01:13.486
What do they mean to you?

00:01:14.531 --> 00:01:14.971
Oh wow.

00:01:14.971 --> 00:01:19.525
So food and fun are pretty closely related, so I'll take those at the same time.

00:01:19.525 --> 00:01:26.382
So for fun, I roast my own coffee and I've been doing that since COVID, since we all got locked down.

00:01:26.382 --> 00:01:28.525
It became my own coffee and I've been doing that since COVID, since we all got locked down.

00:01:28.525 --> 00:01:29.045
It became my COVID hobby.

00:01:29.045 --> 00:01:30.006
So I've still maintained that.

00:01:30.006 --> 00:01:30.926
So I roast my own coffee.

00:01:30.926 --> 00:01:35.230
Family I've got two children, two young children, my wife.

00:01:35.230 --> 00:01:37.792
We all live in Cambridge and England.

00:01:38.512 --> 00:01:40.793
Nice Now roasting your own coffee.

00:01:40.793 --> 00:01:45.558
Does that mean that you have a full-on coffee roaster?

00:01:45.558 --> 00:01:49.941
I?

00:01:50.001 --> 00:01:51.063
noticed that recently, because you do have that.

00:01:51.063 --> 00:01:54.530
Yeah, yeah, I've got my own roaster, I've got my own shed logo bagging machine.

00:01:54.530 --> 00:02:03.730
Wow, I've gone very deep down that rabbit hole Wow, that's so, so cool.

00:02:03.751 --> 00:02:06.257
Like I'm growing coffee beans oh wow, on my property.

00:02:06.257 --> 00:02:11.022
Growing coffee beans oh wow, on my property.

00:02:11.022 --> 00:02:13.248
Yeah, because I'm in a sub-tropical type climate and I want to see you know if I can get any success there.

00:02:13.248 --> 00:02:16.539
Because I'm a big coffee drinker, I order in.

00:02:16.539 --> 00:02:21.097
Yeah, I'm on a subscription service where I have my beans roasted and sent to me.

00:02:21.097 --> 00:02:22.401
Oh wow, serious.

00:02:22.401 --> 00:02:32.400
And because I live so remote from town, it's, you know, one of life's guilty pleasures, if you like to always have a great coffee exactly and I don't like.

00:02:32.439 --> 00:02:35.467
I generally start my day with a just a black coffee.

00:02:35.467 --> 00:02:45.631
So therefore, yeah, the beans are really got to stand up right when you're not injecting any sugar, any milk or anything else into the mix.

00:02:45.631 --> 00:02:47.875
It's just that standalone.

00:02:47.875 --> 00:02:50.606
And I actually had a coffee company for a while.

00:02:50.606 --> 00:02:53.073
I got into the whole cold drip single origin.

00:02:54.722 --> 00:02:54.802
Yeah.

00:02:55.043 --> 00:02:57.348
So I identify with your passion for it.

00:02:58.349 --> 00:03:00.054
Yeah, yeah, we need to talk after this.

00:03:00.599 --> 00:03:02.925
Nice, nice, and so are you selling it.

00:03:03.626 --> 00:03:04.127
No, I did.

00:03:04.127 --> 00:03:13.311
I did for a while just to raise money for my kid's school, but it was more or less a second full-time job, so I kind of toned it down a bit.

00:03:13.311 --> 00:03:14.644
So it's just myself now.

00:03:14.945 --> 00:03:20.062
Wow, when you order a bag of the beans in which are, you know, green, how do you?

00:03:20.062 --> 00:03:21.485
What size are those bags?

00:03:22.468 --> 00:03:22.971
I'm quite lucky.

00:03:22.971 --> 00:03:31.746
I have some supplies where I can buy like a kilo at a time, Half of the cost of what you buy it for in the shop, and plus you get to roast it yourself.

00:03:31.746 --> 00:03:35.489
But when I first started it was hardly small quantities.

00:03:35.489 --> 00:03:39.552
I'd have to buy like 10 to 20 kilos at a time, which is quite a commitment.

00:03:39.954 --> 00:03:41.094
It's massive right.

00:03:41.335 --> 00:03:43.736
My coffee intake went up pretty substantially.

00:03:44.721 --> 00:04:04.574
Yeah, yeah, I've been marketed to recently on Instagram, where somebody has created a coffee roaster that's designed to be worked over a gas hob and it has a temperature probe in it and you could only, I suppose, roast let's say 250 grams to maybe 500 grams at a time in it.

00:04:07.800 --> 00:04:09.506
Let's say 250 grams to maybe 500 grams at a time in it.

00:04:09.506 --> 00:04:18.891
And it's just interesting that there's obviously a lot more people want to take it right from the bean and create their own roast and then just personally use it yeah, yeah, it's becoming more of a thing, I guess yeah, awesome.

00:04:18.891 --> 00:04:23.125
Tell us about your career journey into microsoft oh, wow, wow, okay.

00:04:23.146 --> 00:04:28.375
So I started working in IT, I don't know about 1996.

00:04:28.375 --> 00:04:38.512
So I'm pretty old, been doing IT for a long time and I joined Microsoft 14 years ago and the CAT team probably about three years ago, coming up three years ago now.

00:04:38.512 --> 00:04:46.548
So yeah, I've been all over the show hardware and software and developer and all sorts so how long you've been just in the power platform space?

00:04:47.250 --> 00:04:52.142
since about 2016 gotcha when it was, when it was birthed, pretty much yeah.

00:04:52.142 --> 00:04:52.805
Yeah, I was lucky.

00:04:52.805 --> 00:04:57.745
I was in the right place at the right time to be working with uk company that were just going all in.

00:04:57.745 --> 00:05:07.132
They saw the potential for it and even despite the lack of governance features and administration features back in those days, and even connectors, they still went for it.

00:05:07.132 --> 00:05:09.947
So, yeah, it's good, so good.

00:05:09.947 --> 00:05:10.810
It's been quite a journey.

00:05:11.100 --> 00:05:25.961
It's interesting because, yeah, 2016 was really where that kind of transition happened from Dynamics 365 solution, yeah, and ultimately what we now call Dataverse being separated out from the core and building what we have today.

00:05:25.961 --> 00:05:29.267
And that's nine years, isn't it Nine years ago?

00:05:30.028 --> 00:05:34.043
I know it's crazy, it is crazy, it still feels really new.

00:05:34.043 --> 00:05:37.451
I guess because of the constant change to the platform.

00:05:38.060 --> 00:05:42.610
So the reason for the podcast today is the business value kit.

00:05:42.610 --> 00:05:45.867
Can you tell me what is it?

00:05:45.867 --> 00:05:48.846
First of all, before we unpack the origin of it?

00:05:49.588 --> 00:06:00.250
Yeah, sure, it's a solution that comes with a number of kind of tools to help you develop your own framework to measuring value at scale.

00:06:00.250 --> 00:06:18.043
So whether that's your COE led value kind of framework, where you have administrators choosing the apps that they want to evaluate, or whether you just let your makers, you know, assess their own apps and flows.

00:06:18.043 --> 00:06:31.843
Now, you know, I won't get into the origins of it just yet, but in the process of building it we found there needs to be a pretty tailorable or flexible approach to assessing value, and that's kind of what we tried to start building into this kit.

00:06:31.843 --> 00:06:48.189
So it's a new thing for the CAT team, it's a new thing for us, it's a new thing for everyone really and we'll get more into that in a bit but it's really the first step in a way to automate value assessment at scale, because many of the customers that we're working with have thousands of apps which is to do as manual.

00:06:48.569 --> 00:06:51.259
Yeah, and that's interesting value assessment at scale.

00:06:51.259 --> 00:06:58.086
Because what I find is that a lot of enterprise accounts, many apps get implemented.

00:06:58.086 --> 00:07:16.012
I've seen situations where well over 20,000 apps are implemented in large scale automation and then whoever's responsible for that piece of tech in the organization needs to go to the executive and ask for more funding to do more, build more.

00:07:16.012 --> 00:07:25.305
And a typical executive is always going to want to know what's the value, as in what's the impact has it saved our employees time?

00:07:25.305 --> 00:07:26.050
What's the value, as in.

00:07:26.050 --> 00:07:27.478
What's the impact has it saved our employees time?

00:07:27.478 --> 00:07:28.680
What's the culture around it?

00:07:28.680 --> 00:07:29.562
What's the?

00:07:29.562 --> 00:07:36.680
You know, if we're spending x on software, are we getting a y or a y right from that?

00:07:36.841 --> 00:07:51.052
And I find oftentimes folks in these positions don't have the data to back up what that is in, particularly the financial data to back up what that is and particularly the financial data to back up and have that executive-based conversation inside their organization.

00:07:51.199 --> 00:08:07.382
And of course, last year we had the refresh of the total cost of ownership from Forrester, which is a brilliant insight into the payback time on the investment in the technology, and of course, it's taking a range of companies as part of that.

00:08:07.382 --> 00:08:30.735
But what I like about this and what really resonated with me when I first saw it was it allows me to use my data, my organization data, the apps, the automations, the chatbots, the power pages, environments, et cetera that I'm running and really quantify value, not from a case study like what you get with a Forrester report, but really what does it mean to me?

00:08:30.735 --> 00:08:45.611
And that's where I was like, wow, this is going to give a tool set for those different, often IT departments to really come up with justification for investment from the business and from their executive layer.

00:08:45.611 --> 00:08:46.552
Is that how you saw it?

00:08:47.575 --> 00:08:56.549
In short, yes, but it took me a while to get there, because one of the things that we found, or that I found when putting this together it was kind of like a rant it came up.

00:08:56.549 --> 00:09:02.432
So I started working with a customer who had been using the Power Platform for a couple of years.

00:09:02.432 --> 00:09:06.769
They had made an investment and they were looking for return investment.

00:09:06.769 --> 00:09:11.508
You know, that was the first thing they said to me how do I prove that we're developing of anything of any use?

00:09:11.508 --> 00:09:12.991
Really good numbers.

00:09:12.991 --> 00:09:15.224
You know a few thousand apps, few thousand flows really good.

00:09:15.224 --> 00:09:18.831
You know active usage, very active communities.

00:09:18.831 --> 00:09:23.171
You know all of those kind of check boxes were ticked and everything was moving in the right direction.

00:09:23.171 --> 00:09:27.331
But that was their first question was how do we go back to people and say, what are we getting out of this?

00:09:27.331 --> 00:09:29.005
And that was really difficult.

00:09:29.005 --> 00:09:33.190
So I spoke to nearly 20 customers with the same question.

00:09:33.190 --> 00:09:35.485
You know, like how do you assess value?

00:09:35.485 --> 00:09:36.985
And basically nobody was.

00:09:36.985 --> 00:09:44.743
So I then made a really big problem for myself because they were all asking the same question during that interview and other customers did so.

00:09:44.783 --> 00:09:50.587
Now I now, from one customer to over 20, they all had slightly different reasons to know it.

00:09:50.587 --> 00:09:56.993
Some of them were based around their investment, others were more governance-led.

00:09:56.993 --> 00:10:03.606
So they were thinking you know, if we've got really valuable apps and flows out there that we don't know about, then that's an increase in risk for us.

00:10:03.606 --> 00:10:06.124
And that became the start of it.

00:10:06.124 --> 00:10:07.868
You know was to figure out how do we do it.

00:10:07.868 --> 00:10:26.892
So, being I'm in a very kind of privileged position to be able to sort of sit on the the shoulders of other people, we have a team I need to mention our business value assessment team so people like robert, fran and john, and they specialize in helping customers understand the value of the Power Platform.

00:10:26.892 --> 00:10:31.751
Now, for me to do that, I kind of needed to understand value a little bit more deeply.

00:10:31.751 --> 00:10:36.051
I was much like any person thinking it's just time or money, yeah yeah.

00:10:36.301 --> 00:10:40.666
You know if it's something you're automating, it's just saving you time and you know it's way more than that.

00:10:40.666 --> 00:10:48.186
I learned that over the course of putting this kit together that value is perceived very, very differently with inside an organization.

00:10:48.186 --> 00:10:57.941
You know, if you talk to somebody in finance about what does a valuable power app look like, you're going to get something that's very different to someone in sales or research or whatever the other you know.

00:10:57.941 --> 00:11:09.173
So it's very diverse, not just at the business unit or department, but even at a personal level, and that made the problem a lot harder to try and figure out, because you know time and money isn't great.

00:11:09.173 --> 00:11:26.703
That's not the full picture, it's not the full, true story of value, and so I sat in some interviews with our EVA team and just really liked the way that they teased out the value from talking to a citizen developer, you know, just asking them to share what was the problem that you had.

00:11:26.703 --> 00:11:45.951
You know why did you even need to build an app and what was the cost of doing nothing right so straight away, they're starting to get to this kind of yeah, a real empathetic kind of connection, and then you know they take the conversation talking about what they built just to let them really show off.

00:11:46.299 --> 00:12:03.171
It's a real many people, especially outside of IT, when people feel really impactful and cool apps they love and it's great to see stories like that and that kind of flow or process kind of to me was like, well, that's how we can get the true value out of somebody, that personal value at least.

00:12:03.171 --> 00:12:11.054
But how do we demonstrate that in a way that's one eventually going to be tangible and and, secondly, going to be most impactful?

00:12:11.054 --> 00:12:31.216
Now, where I settled with that was well, organizations have departments, have objectives and goals, things that they're trying to achieve, and if we can try and align the story with the objectives and goals of the organization just the entire organization then we're going to get a much broader picture over the true value of this thing.

00:12:31.216 --> 00:12:35.216
It's having a tangible impact against objectives and goals inside the organization.

00:12:35.216 --> 00:12:48.275
And that was kind of like the key, like almost discipline principle, of the whole kit was, you know, make sure that the value that we can extract from the story is aligned to the objectives of the organization.

00:12:48.275 --> 00:12:51.272
And so that was the approach.

00:12:51.645 --> 00:13:02.273
That's the mechanism to actually get to value, at least for now, and by having a kit and automation helps customers, like you mentioned, mark your customers in 20,000, 30,000 apps.

00:13:02.273 --> 00:13:03.677
Where do you even start?

00:13:03.677 --> 00:13:15.409
You've got the C-Restarter kit and the Gathering Center, where you can see all these great dashboards around apps that are being used and broadly shared and have been used, but you don't understand the value of those things.

00:13:15.409 --> 00:13:18.546
So that was the big challenge for us we don't know where to start.

00:13:18.546 --> 00:13:25.610
We need something that's automated and we don't have the skills because you know, assessing value is actually something that's really quite difficult to do.

00:13:26.894 --> 00:13:45.149
So that's the backstory to it so you've raised a lot of interesting things, because, you know, when we talk about roi return on investment we talk about things like time and money right saved, and it's interesting that you've brought up the story factor.

00:13:45.149 --> 00:13:51.967
So, inside the tool is their ability to capture that story, almost the.

00:13:51.967 --> 00:13:53.871
You know what was the problem.

00:13:53.871 --> 00:13:55.596
That's why I built the solution.

00:13:55.596 --> 00:13:56.905
This is the outcome.

00:13:56.905 --> 00:13:59.312
Is that part of what the tool is doing?

00:13:59.312 --> 00:14:04.971
And then, is that auto triggered, how else are you capturing value within the organization?

00:14:06.312 --> 00:14:08.398
that's the main way that actual crisis is.

00:14:08.398 --> 00:14:10.908
You know there are two ways you can start an assessment.

00:14:10.908 --> 00:14:13.513
One is on on an app.

00:14:13.513 --> 00:14:16.739
There's a Canvas app in the solution, in Business Value Toolkit solution.

00:14:16.739 --> 00:14:23.033
What you launch it, it gives you a list of all the apps that you want and you can select an app and go through the assessment process.

00:14:23.033 --> 00:14:23.735
That's if you want to.

00:14:23.735 --> 00:14:26.731
Or administrators can choose one.

00:14:26.731 --> 00:14:35.913
Choose an app from their dashboard, just copying the ID of the app in the environment, run a flow and it will send the app owner an adaptive card saying great job.

00:14:35.913 --> 00:14:37.837
We want you to come and do this assessment now.

00:14:37.878 --> 00:14:39.008
That's supposed to be exactly what we do.

00:14:39.008 --> 00:14:41.053
Then markets we capture the challenges.

00:14:41.053 --> 00:14:44.274
You know, what was it the, the problems you were facing, or the idea that you had.

00:14:44.274 --> 00:14:46.926
What did you build, what were the challenges that you had.

00:14:46.926 --> 00:14:56.234
Because at the same time, we need to collect as much information as we can to do the assessment, but at the same time we're also trying to tell your story, because capturing the data is only half the picture.

00:14:56.234 --> 00:15:05.052
We still need to figure out how we're going to communicate that inside your organization, and so we let you kind of do that through this five-step storytelling framework almost.

00:15:05.645 --> 00:15:10.532
And then we use generative AI in the background to kind of restructure it.

00:15:10.532 --> 00:15:16.272
So if you've ever read, like a case study, one of microsoft's case studies, they're almost like a james bolivar.

00:15:16.272 --> 00:15:16.552
Really.

00:15:16.552 --> 00:15:25.349
They're very predictable in the way that they're kind of structured, and so we use prompts to restructure the story and kind of enhance it a little bit using that kind of approach.

00:15:25.349 --> 00:15:32.259
And then we take that version of the story and present it back to the person that shared it, just make sure that they're happy with it.

00:15:32.259 --> 00:15:42.630
And as soon as they're happy with it, we create an unpublished page on your intranet so that you can start to build up a backlog of these success stories, because that was one of the key things when I was talking to customers.

00:15:42.630 --> 00:15:47.605
I found kind of that the average was like the sweet spot was like two to three success stories.

00:15:47.605 --> 00:15:56.673
In some cases that was per year and in others that was as many as they had, but it was always like two to three.

00:15:56.673 --> 00:15:57.697
Because that's quite an undertaking.

00:15:57.697 --> 00:16:03.455
You know, writing a story is takes a certain amount of time and so, like the only feedback is the first customer that started using it.

00:16:03.455 --> 00:16:11.129
They'd gone from three success stories since they've been using the platform to like one per assessment and they had a backlog of 30 odd at that point in time.

00:16:11.129 --> 00:16:12.530
So so it's really good.

00:16:12.530 --> 00:16:16.677
That's one part of what we talk about communicating the value in a little, in a little while.

00:16:17.438 --> 00:16:35.538
So we take that ai generated or enhanced story and then we use a second prompt to compare it against objectives and goals within your organization, and so we have, you know, there's a like a model driven app where you you enter the objectives and goals, analyze it for alignment and impacts.

00:16:35.538 --> 00:16:43.984
So how closely does your story align to this objective and, if we can detect from your information that you shared, what kind of impact is it having?

00:16:43.984 --> 00:16:46.850
Is it sort of tangible or intangible like ie?

00:16:46.850 --> 00:16:52.335
You know you're saving 30 hours a week, or just so that would be tangible or intangible.

00:16:52.335 --> 00:16:54.986
Be like, you know, staff morale approved or something?

00:16:54.986 --> 00:17:06.589
We start to try and extract as much value as we can out of that and then we try to present that back to the user as a list of here's all of the different ways we think your app is having value.

00:17:06.589 --> 00:17:20.093
And at this point you've gone from most likely having a pretty narrow problem that you were trying to solve, a narrowlyly scoped problem, to being presented with all of the different ways this thing could be adding value inside your organization that you probably didn't even know about.

00:17:20.093 --> 00:17:31.232
A really good example of that shared back with customers where they've built an app in one department and without even realizing they're helping another department's objectives by being more efficient or streamlined or whatever.

00:17:31.232 --> 00:17:40.028
So the flow is you go through these assessments assessments you agree or disagree with the ones you think it sounds like it's quite plausible.

00:17:40.028 --> 00:17:45.950
I'd be happy to say that's some impact I'm having and then we go through a value calculator, which is the final stage.

00:17:45.990 --> 00:17:54.016
So for each objective and goal we try to get to some tangible value and a good example one of the first customers I worked with.

00:17:54.016 --> 00:18:13.017
They had like a health and safety directorate where they had to go around all the vehicle depots in the UK performing audits and they were a very small team, lots of depots, and they were kind of doing it in very disparate ways and so they built someone into the one just to standardize the way that they were doing audits.

00:18:13.017 --> 00:18:21.647
That was the whole reason for this app and what they didn't realize because they didn't approach it the same way that maybe we would.

00:18:21.647 --> 00:18:32.710
You know the health and safety inspectors, not an IT architect they didn't realize that they were collecting all this really awesome information and after a few months they realized that they were.

00:18:32.710 --> 00:18:53.451
And then they started to, as their skills improved, they started to power BI over this and then they were able to detect you know which depots were having the most kind of workplace incidents and they were able to start building like proactive campaigns and all of this stuff just with this one app and you know that kind of story that they didn't realize the broader impact that they were having.

00:18:54.105 --> 00:19:00.778
And so you know that's one of the things that we're trying to do in this year is to give you a full idea over the impact that that's having.

00:19:00.778 --> 00:19:08.558
And the way that we got to tangible value with this example was that they saw a reduction in common workplace injuries.

00:19:08.558 --> 00:19:13.065
So we said, well, so what's the average cost to an organization if someone injures themselves?

00:19:13.065 --> 00:19:16.276
Is it like £5, or fifty thousand pounds?

00:19:16.276 --> 00:19:22.776
And the reduction in workplace injuries times the cost of a workplace injury was the value of the app that we managed to get to.

00:19:22.776 --> 00:19:25.230
So you know one example.

00:19:25.310 --> 00:19:52.878
But so we use like this concept if the average cost of something that's closely related to the objective to help you get somewhere nearer, you know an accurate yeah, a tangent that is so interesting, because that tangible value of that you're not going to capture oftentimes in an ROI calculator is it was 10 people, their cost per hour is x and therefore we've wiped off this amount of time and this is a reduction.

00:19:52.878 --> 00:20:09.607
What all those tools don't take into account is that we reduce workplace injury, as that example right, and the dollar value of that, or the implication, whether it's, you know, insurance premiums or any other number of things, loss of life even.

00:20:09.607 --> 00:20:22.406
Yeah, the implication is much larger than just we save somebody five minutes a day or 20 minutes a day or something like that, which is the more very binary way of looking at value creation.

00:20:23.269 --> 00:20:30.164
It is and those kinds of measures often um lead into okay, so you're saving 20 minutes a day.

00:20:30.164 --> 00:20:31.387
What are you doing with those 20 minutes?

00:20:31.387 --> 00:20:35.175
Yeah, a longer smoke break, or?

00:20:35.636 --> 00:20:38.162
yeah yeah, you know, and it can.

00:20:38.162 --> 00:20:40.666
It can lead you down to a part they maybe didn't anticipate.

00:20:40.666 --> 00:20:53.229
So for version one of the kit, you know we we focused on was to try and make it that if customers a way of measuring value, it was very personal to their organization and the kit does that quite nicely.

00:20:53.229 --> 00:21:07.517
You know it captures a lot of information in the background and I guess that kind of leads to the next thing I want to talk about, really, which is we now have an approach, or we've given customers an approach, to measuring value at scale so they can collect all of this assessment data.

00:21:07.517 --> 00:21:10.490
I guess the other part is communicating that.

00:21:10.490 --> 00:21:32.648
So you've got a very broad spectrum of people that are interested in this information inside your organization, and one of the things that we're trying to kind of encourage customers to do is to think about when you've captured the story, consider all of the different audiences that you need to communicate it to, because they're not all interested in the same level of detail.

00:21:32.669 --> 00:21:40.087
Your, your ctr is not going to really be happy about the success stories, most likely, but they're going to read pages and pages.

00:21:40.087 --> 00:21:42.734
No, no, to get to that number.

00:21:42.734 --> 00:21:59.219
They just want a dashboard that says you know, this level of investment has saved this much money, or whatever the, and to show that in a way that's aligned to the objectives that they care about, I think is far more impactful than just saying the power platform saved $2 million or whatever.

00:21:59.219 --> 00:22:09.473
Yeah, so one of the things we try to encourage customers to do is do a bit of audience analysis understand who the stakeholders are, understand what information is actually important to them.

00:22:09.473 --> 00:22:13.608
You're capturing a lot with this tool, so identify which parts are really important to them.

00:22:13.608 --> 00:22:19.246
You know you're capturing a lot, um with this tool, so identify which parts are, you know, really important to them and consider the level of detail that they're interested in.

00:22:19.446 --> 00:22:27.894
So, like the app maker, I'm dead interested in, like how many users I hear my app per month and how long their sessions are and which buttons they're clicking.

00:22:27.894 --> 00:22:30.087
My cto that doesn't care about that.

00:22:30.087 --> 00:22:32.192
Yeah, this is care is care about how much you know.

00:22:32.192 --> 00:22:32.692
Whatever.

00:22:32.692 --> 00:22:36.853
If there is an objective that this thing is aligned to, how is it having an impact on that?

00:22:36.853 --> 00:22:53.538
So, you know, consider that, and one of the things that did when I was building this was, at the point in time where it generates the story, is to curate different versions of it for different channels, so like for Teams messaging or HTML newsletters or whatever, or Viva Engage announcements.

00:22:53.538 --> 00:23:04.550
Just think about all of the different ways that you can take that single story and then curate different versions for different channels, and that seems to be a good way to consider communicating that value.

00:23:04.845 --> 00:23:15.048
One of the questions I've had about it was is there a dependency on having the COE starter kit or the COE kit installed before you can actually use this?

00:23:15.708 --> 00:23:16.048
No, there is.

00:23:16.048 --> 00:23:23.582
We kept it kind of decoupled intentionally, purely because it does serve a very niche purpose.

00:23:23.582 --> 00:23:30.338
You know, it's not something that every customer wants to really get involved in, so it's a standalone solution.

00:23:30.338 --> 00:23:43.896
However, you know we've had a couple of people that have connected it up to the app table, for example in the C-Week stuff like it, just to make the process of you know setting apps that people own a bit faster because we're using APIs.

00:23:45.829 --> 00:23:46.351
And what about things like?

00:23:46.351 --> 00:23:54.375
You mentioned that if I'm the creator of the app, I want to know which buttons they're using, how they're using it, the frequency, how many people?

00:23:54.375 --> 00:23:57.602
A lot of that is telemetry based data.

00:23:57.602 --> 00:24:00.012
Are you ingesting that as part of this?

00:24:00.634 --> 00:24:05.703
no, no, we're keeping it as simple as possible and in fact, we're trying to make it even simpler.

00:24:05.703 --> 00:24:25.077
So, taking things like the app description that's generated by AI in managed environments, looking at that, is there enough information there to kind of suggest value, to at least bubble up the apps that look valuable and then make the way that you assess these things a little bit easier and less cumbersome?

00:24:25.077 --> 00:24:38.020
So the whole point of this was really just to get something out there, see if customers like it, see if they get any value from it, see if there's any value to them and if there is, then we'll continue iterating on that and improving it.

00:24:38.020 --> 00:24:40.638
So there's lots of ideas flowing around at the moment.

00:24:41.049 --> 00:24:44.180
What typical role that would go and install this in an organization.

00:24:44.180 --> 00:24:52.917
Is it like a business analyst type skill set that would need to get this set up and configured and ready to start becoming operational?

00:24:53.398 --> 00:24:53.901
Not so much.

00:24:53.901 --> 00:24:57.219
I think we've mostly worked when we've heard from customers.

00:24:57.219 --> 00:25:02.138
It's been people that are involved in supporting the power platform, so admins, they're involved in setting it up.

00:25:02.138 --> 00:25:06.939
I guess the challenge is really in collecting the objectives and goals of the organization.

00:25:06.939 --> 00:25:17.402
Yeah, finding the people to talk to you know what the objectives and goals are of the various parts of the organization, and one of the things we've seen customers do quite successfully is is they roll it.

00:25:17.402 --> 00:25:19.294
They have like a phase roll out of this tool.

00:25:19.294 --> 00:25:22.582
So they'll pick on a department to say finance as an example.

00:25:22.582 --> 00:25:31.805
Yes, they'll talk about the tool to the finance team and ask them to you know what are the objectives and goals of your organization and populate the tool as they're kind of rolling out.

00:25:31.805 --> 00:25:35.820
And that seems to be quite a sweet spot for you know, for getting this thing to work.

00:25:36.490 --> 00:25:36.711
What's the?

00:25:36.750 --> 00:25:38.536
feedback you've received Very good.

00:25:38.536 --> 00:25:40.903
Yeah, really good, yeah, really good.

00:25:40.903 --> 00:25:47.096
In terms of, like you know, customers have gone from, I guess, scarcity to abundance.

00:25:47.096 --> 00:25:48.259
In terms of success stories, you know they get one per.

00:25:48.259 --> 00:25:50.084
You know one per assessment, which is one good thing.

00:25:50.084 --> 00:25:53.720
We've had customers that were using it from more of a governance perspective.

00:25:53.720 --> 00:25:59.143
You know their feedback is now they're able to see the high risk gaps that they didn't know about before.

00:25:59.143 --> 00:26:02.398
They're capturing the value data as well, which is really useful.

00:26:02.398 --> 00:26:08.509
We've had other feedback around the setup of it and some of the challenges around getting objectives and goals out of people.

00:26:08.509 --> 00:26:11.688
So we're starting to think about is there any guidance we can provide there?

00:26:11.749 --> 00:26:11.930
Yeah, yeah.

00:26:13.554 --> 00:26:16.402
Which is more on that phase to kind of roll that approach.

00:26:16.402 --> 00:26:18.089
But yeah, it's been really positive.

00:26:18.089 --> 00:26:26.652
I think customers appreciate that they've got something now that goes a little bit further than just, oh, you're saving X amount of time or money.

00:26:26.652 --> 00:26:33.723
They're able to get a much broader downstream and upstream kind of view on value from the thing that they're looking at.

00:26:34.023 --> 00:26:38.200
Yeah, where can people get it and install it and whatnot.

00:26:38.961 --> 00:26:41.455
Yeah, so you can go to the PowerCat.

00:26:41.455 --> 00:26:43.842
The COE starter kit has a GitHub repo.

00:26:43.842 --> 00:26:53.064
It's part of the core solution there, so you can just download it and you'll see business value toolkit as a standalone solution file when you download it.

00:26:53.064 --> 00:26:55.617
The setup is pretty straightforward.

00:26:55.617 --> 00:27:00.441
There's just a few connector references or connections to create, and that's it.

00:27:00.441 --> 00:27:01.262
You're off to go.

00:27:01.262 --> 00:27:04.356
I guess the only thing to call out really is this is you?

00:27:04.356 --> 00:27:07.384
What I do get hear a lot about is ai builder credits.

00:27:07.384 --> 00:27:16.557
Make sure you have some assigned to the environment that you're using it in, because otherwise you're gonna you're gonna waste a lot of your own time there excellent, excellent, okay, so it's using ai builder.

00:27:16.759 --> 00:27:21.900
Does copilot shoe you come into the mix at all no, not really, not at the moment.

00:27:22.000 --> 00:27:23.202
It probably will do in the future.

00:27:23.202 --> 00:27:24.125
You know this was.

00:27:24.125 --> 00:27:25.551
You know I started built.

00:27:25.551 --> 00:27:33.253
I started building it probably summer last year and it's just a few weeks before the conference in las vegas.

00:27:33.253 --> 00:27:41.811
So yeah a lot's changed since then, obviously yeah you know, there's different ways that we can make this, so hopefully, like in an idea, was something that runs in the background.

00:27:41.811 --> 00:27:43.597
Yeah, that would be ideal.

00:27:43.597 --> 00:27:44.259
I'd like to get it too.

00:27:45.029 --> 00:27:51.196
And final question I have for you is, now that customers are using it, what are they asking to be added?

00:27:51.196 --> 00:27:57.819
You talked about those you know, getting that baseline information in there to start with.

00:27:57.819 --> 00:27:59.234
What else are they asking for?

00:27:59.717 --> 00:28:03.640
Yeah, they're asking mostly for a Power BI dashboard.

00:28:03.640 --> 00:28:06.832
Yeah, now, which, which you know.

00:28:06.832 --> 00:28:23.242
Like I said, when I was kind of doing some research before I really started building this thing, one of the questions I was asking customers and I interviewed nearly 20 or 21 actually was what does like an ideal dashboard look like, and I was hoping to get to like the 18, 20 kind of.

00:28:23.242 --> 00:28:25.028
I couldn't get anywhere near it.

00:28:25.028 --> 00:28:26.131
Everybody had.

00:28:26.131 --> 00:28:32.272
You know, the way organizations are structured and as soon as you start to show value will be very personal.

00:28:32.272 --> 00:28:34.724
It's all about the objectives and goals of your own organization.

00:28:34.724 --> 00:28:41.653
You kind of really move away from having the opportunity to build a dashboard that's going to tick most of the boxes that people want to see ticked.

00:28:41.653 --> 00:28:42.696
So that's one thing I need to kind of think about.

00:28:42.696 --> 00:28:44.203
But that's going to tick most of the boxes that people want to see ticked.

00:28:44.203 --> 00:28:45.569
So that's one thing I need to kind of think about.

00:28:45.569 --> 00:28:48.256
But that's been the biggest task is you know?

00:28:48.256 --> 00:28:49.921
Can we have a dashboard please?

00:28:49.921 --> 00:28:50.722
Awesome.

00:28:51.549 --> 00:28:53.458
Steve, before I let you go, is there anything else you want to add?

00:28:54.089 --> 00:28:57.617
I'd say, you know, just be aware this is a journey really.

00:28:57.617 --> 00:29:13.082
You know, measuring value is something that I guess is new to most organizations, you know, and the idea of the kit really is to give customers something that they can use and ultimately, ideally, there will be no kit because it will be in the product.

00:29:13.082 --> 00:29:16.680
So that's my kind of that's what's in it.

00:29:16.680 --> 00:29:22.339
For me is, I'd rather this was in the product than in a kit, so hopefully I can influence that somewhat.

00:29:22.339 --> 00:29:27.936
But yeah, you know it'll be improved and iterated on over the next few months, for sure.

00:29:28.890 --> 00:29:30.016
Hey, thanks for listening.

00:29:30.016 --> 00:29:33.357
I'm your host, mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy.

00:29:33.357 --> 00:29:36.859
Is there a guest you would like to see on the show from Microsoft?

00:29:36.859 --> 00:29:39.817
Please message me on LinkedIn and I'll see what I can do.

00:29:39.817 --> 00:29:46.301
Final question for you how will you create with Copilot today, ka kite?

The Business Value Kit: Quantify Value & Return on Investment (ROI)

Listen On

Recent Episodes

Power Platform Show Episodes

MVP Show Episodes

Power 365 Show Episodes

Ecosystem Show Episodes

Copilot Show Episodes

Browse episodes by category

The Business Value Kit: Quantify Value & Return on Investment (ROI)

Join over 1500 Power Platform & Dynamics 365 pros for a quick, fun, and insightful 4-minute read each week!

Subscribe to Tech Trailblazer newsletter

Listen On

Recent Episodes

Power Platform Show Episodes

MVP Show Episodes

Power 365 Show Episodes

Ecosystem Show Episodes

Copilot Show Episodes

Browse episodes by category