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#34. I chat with Andrew Bibby about his successful Dynamics 365 project at Devon Financial Services*.Andrew is a Microsoft Business Applications MVP with over 12 years’ experience implementing Dynamics CRM and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for several Microsoft partners and through his own company as an independent project advisor.The CRM project at Devon Financial Services was a five-year business transformation programme to improve the efficiency of their financial advisors by digitising paper-based client on-boarding and sales processes. Andrew’s role as an independent project advisor is to assist the customer and their Microsoft partner to achieve the project’s outcomes.Listen in as Andrew highlights several critical factors to the success of the CRM project at Devon Financial Services:The value of using an independent project advisor especially, if you’re a Microsoft customer with insufficient capacity or previous experience implementing Dynamics 365.Use a proof-of-concept to mitigate technical and business risks early in the project.Don’t change Microsoft partner (if you can help it).Get the right people on the team.Using Azure DevOps as a single source of all requirements and work tracking.Consistent executive sponsorship.An emphasis on change management, not just with the users, but also a communication effort within and across the project workstreams.Having a co-located project team to improve daily communications.Requirements are fundamentally important.ResourcesAndrew Bibby on LinkedInAndrew Bibby on TwitterProximo3 on LinkedInProximo3 websiteSupport the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

24 Juli 201955min

#33. I'm joined by Johan Adenmark and Carolina Edvinsson from NAB Solutions. NAB Solutions was a finalist in the 2019 Microsoft Partner of the Year awards for the innovative work migrating 25 Dynamics NAV customers to Dynamics 365 Business Central within just a few months.Johan and Carolina share their experience undertaking so many cloud migrations and how they've had to transform how NAB Solutions works in order to migrate or deploy one customer every couple of days.We also learn their advice for nominating your organisation for the PotY awards. This was the first time that NAB Solutions had entered and they've achieved a finalist position in their first go.Download the PotY award rules, guidelines, judges' advice and FAQs from the Microsoft Partner awards site.ResourcesJohan Adenmark on LinkedInCarolina Edvinsson on LinkedInNAB Solutions on LinkedInSupport the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

13 Juli 201932min

#32. Have you ever been asked:"How much have you customised Dynamics 365?""Is our CRM system customised more or less than average?""Have we customised our system too much?"I've heard this question lots of times from IT leaders who want to know whether our Dynamics 365 system will continue to be supportable, extensible, updateable and performant.But how should we answer it? Support the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

3 Juli 201913min

#31. Have you ever had a Dynamics 365 or Power Apps disaster?I share the tale of my failed Power Apps Portals project. It got cancelled by the client before we released it to production.What went wrong? Are there warning signs that you can spot to avoid a Dynamics disaster of your own?Support the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

13 Juni 201922min

#30. Emergent design is an advanced practice for Microsoft Business Application team experienced in Scrum.What is emergent design?When we practice emergent design, the development team designs the solution to meet the users’ needs just before we build the feature.The opposite of emergent design is up-front design. This is when the solution is designed in the Design phase of the project, usually by a solution architect, based on the requirements specification published in the Analysis phase, and before any software has been developed.Advantages of emergent designCompared to designing all your features up-front near the beginning of the project, emergent design offers several advantages:The development team are working closely with the users so they have first-hand experience of their current pain points and future needs so there is less reliance on written requirements specifications.Once we’ve designed the solution, we can estimate it. The estimates are based on building previous features by this team for these users, and the estimates enable the product owner to determine whether the feature is valuable enough to build or defer.Our experience building working features for our users means that our designs are much more likely to meet their needs and our estimates are much more likely to be accurate than designs and estimates guessed at during a Sure Step project.Listen to Scrum Dynamics podcast episode 30 or watch the video on YouTube to find out why I love emergent design and how I used it on my recent project to find the best possible design for integrating Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement with Adobe Campaign.Support the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

30 Maj 201912min

#29. Can you use a definition of done for a sprint?I outline six ideas for a definition of done for a user story and three ideas for a definition of done for a sprint.According to the Scrum Guide, the definition of done helps us agree on when a product backlog item is complete. A sprint, on the other hand, is a time-boxed event so it's done when the time is up.But my teams have found it useful to have a definition of done for a sprint too. And one of our criteria is to run the Power Apps Solution Checker on our custom solutions. The Power Apps Solution Checker is now generally available in Dataverse. It runs hundreds of checks on your plug-ins, customer workflow activities, web resources and configurations and warns you if there are any issues. Running the Power Apps Solution Checker at the end of every sprint helps my team ensure that their solutions are supported, maintainable, extensible and won't cause any performance issues.What definition of done do you use for your user stories? Do you use a definition of done for sprints or releases? I'd love to know in the comments.Links mentioned in the show:Scrum Mastery book giveaway enter before 21 April 2019 to win a copy of Geoff Watts' book.Customery Insiders subscribe and receive my Periodic Table of the Elements for Dynamics 365.Support the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

16 Maj 201910min

#28. Shawn Tabor wants to know whether to estimate project effort in days or story points. Aren't they the same thing?I've used four ways of estimating effort in my Dynamics 365 projects:Counting cardsDaysT-shirtsStory pointsEstimating in days is an absolute estimation method, whereas t-shirts and story points are both relative estimation methods. This means that we compare the relative size of items using a scale, rather than trying to estimate the absolute size.Story point estimation has several benefits:It's not as critical to know exactly what types of work are included in the estimateStory points encourage me to estimate how long it'll take the team to get the story done, not just me or my partStory point estimates don't need to be re-estimated if our velocity changes if we change our definition of done or our team compositionHumans are better at relative estimation, which Neil tries to illustrate with the land area of countries.Shawn, stop estimating Microsoft Business Applications projects in days and start using story points!ResourcesShawn Tabor on LinkedInCRM Hobbit on TwitterCRM Hobbit websiteSupport the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

6 Maj 201910min

#27. Jonas Wauters from KPMG Belgium has a challenge pitching a Dynamics 365 project using Scrum to a prospective client. In particular, he'd like to know how to handle it when clients ask those three little questions:What are you going to deliver?When are you going to deliver it?How much is it going to cost?Neil's advice is to avoiding assuming that if a client is familiar with agile that everyone in the client's team is familiar with Scrum. Make sure you describe your Scrum framework in your proposal and presentation so that everyone has a common understanding.Neil also describes how he uses user story maps to help clients visualise the scope, timeline and costs associated with a Dynamics 365 project.You can find out more about story maps for Dynamics 365 here: https://customery.com/storymaps. Support the showCONNECT🌏 Amazing Apps website🟦 Customery on LinkedIn🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn MY ONLINE COURSES🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps 🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps 📐 Estimating Business Apps Keep experimenting 🧪-Neil

24 Apr 201910min