#130. Sprint 1 is a magical, wonderful, beautiful thing. Find out how my messy, unstructured and un-estimated sprint 1 unfurled on a recent project to build a Power Platform app for a mid-size Microsoft customer in financial services.

In-person conferences I didn't attend:

• Power Platform Conference
• Nordic Summit
• South Coast Summit

Upcoming online conferences I'm presenting at:

• 2 Nov 2022 at Power Platform 24
• 4 Nov 2022 at New Zealand Business Applications Summit

Learn how to qualify, pitch, propose and close more agile projects:

• Winning Agile Projects

Tools we're using in sprint one:

• Miro for visual collaboration
• Atlassian Confluence for wiki pages
• Atlassian Bitbucket and Sourcetree for source control
• Azure DevOps for backlog, boards and pipelines
• Slack for chat
• Zoom for meetings
• SharePoint for file sharing
• Copy.ai for AI-assisted creative copywriting

Support the show

CONNECT

🌏 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

#129. Learn how to use story point estimation to estimate the relative size of your Dynamics 365 or Power Platform application's requirements.

You'll also learn:

• How to slice user stories into the right size for estimation and development
• How to decide on a standard user story for comparing other stories against when estimating
• How to use affinity estimation or planning poker to estimate the relative size of user stories
• How to derive the duration that describes how long it'll take to build the feature after you've estimated the size

This episode is the third of three episodes taken from my new course: Estimating Business Applications. You can join for free today and get access to the first three sections containing 17 video lessons and 3 quizzes to test your understanding.

Support the show

CONNECT

🌏 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

#128. My wife, Natascha, is a faster trail runner than I am. Find out why estimating trail runs in units of time leads to misaligned expectations about how long it'll take for us to run the same trail together. 

You'll also learn:

• What story points are
• Three factors affecting the size of a requirement
• How to account for Hick's Law and Weber's Law  when choosing an estimation scale
• The two estimation scales commonly used by agile teams
• The estimation scale my teams use

This episode is the second of three episodes taken from my new course: Estimating Business Applications. You can join for free today and get access to the first three sections containing 17 video lessons and 3 quizzes to test your understanding.

Support the show

CONNECT

🌏 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

#127. Do you really have to estimate the effort of building the Dynamics 365 or Power Platform apps you've been asked to build? If you work for a Microsoft partner, you probably do -- unless you work for a customer who doesn't care how much it costs or how long it takes. 

Find out how I approach estimation:

• How much and how long?
• Why estimates are notoriously inaccurate
• Estimating time doesn't work
• Estimating t-shirts doesn't either
• Estimates, forecasts and commitments

This episode is the first of three episodes taken from my new course: Estimating Business Applications. You can join for free today and get access to the first three sections containing 17 video lessons and 3 quizzes to test your understanding.

Support the show

CONNECT

🌏 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

#126. Thanks for all your questions about estimating business applications. In this episode, I tackle four tricky situations when it comes to estimating Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications.

• Should we re-estimate items in our backlog after we’re done because they were easier or harder than originally expected? — Tanika
• If we don’t complete a story by the end of the sprint, should we re-estimate how much work is remaining and split the story points across the sprints in which the work got done? — Jane
• Should we estimate user stories or estimate tasks of the user stories? — Naz
• Should our developers include the time spent in scrum events in their estimates? — Dipesh

Resources

• Estimating Business Applications, my new course available for free from Customery Academy.
• "When Will It Be Done?: Lean-Agile Forecasting to Answer Your Customer's Most Important Question" by Daniel Vicanti. 

Support the show

CONNECT

🌏 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

#125. In this episode of Amazing Applications, Emil Hovgaard and Sheelan Bhana of EY Nordic Tech Hub share the story behind EY's PowerPost application and how it has made the General Ledger posting process easier and faster for the EY organization. 

• Emil’s background and his role at the EY organization
• Sheelan’s background and his role at the EY organization
• Emil’s favorite Microsoft application
• Sheelan’s favorite Microsoft application
• What Emil did during his time in the EY strategy team in Australia
• The internal purpose of the EY organization
• The business challenge that Emil’s team had to solve that led to the creation of the PowerPost application
• The approach that Emil and his team took in building the PowerPost application
• Sheelan talks about connecting to SAP from a Power Platform application and the challenges that came with that
• What the PowerPost project team looked like
• Emil’s definition of a Fusion team
• Sheelan’s experience working with Fusion developers
• What drove members of the EY Global Finance and ERP teams to support the creation of the PowerPost application?
• How Sheelan and the team gathered requirements
• The tools that Sheelan and the team used in building the PowerPost application
• The testing approach that Sheelan and the team used
• How long did the PowerPost project take?
• The challenges that Sheelan and the team faced during the course of the PowerPost project
• How did Emil and his team approach user interface design?
• How Nordic Tech Hub is responding to the possibility of users demanding more from Microsoft business applications
• The results that EY managed to achieve using the PowerPost application
• What’s next for Nordic Tech Hub?

Resources

• EY helps enable entry at source for a global finance process with Power Platform, reducing lead times by 95 percent on Microsoft Customer Stories.
• Emil Hovegaard on LinkedIn 
• Sheelan Bhana on LinkedIn

Support the show

CONNECT

🌏 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

#124. When you're using an agile approach, like Scrum, how and when should you document your Dynamics 365 or Power Platform applications? After all, the Agile Manifesto says, "We value working software over comprehensive documentation", right?

Before projects start, my teams document requirements in a product backlog, visualise the backlog in a user story map, and discuss the project during a solution blueprint review workshop.

During sprints, we're writing unit tests, functional test cases, describing our features in wiki pages and tracking our decisions in a decision register.

Towards the end of the project or before a production release, we'll export the wiki as an as-as-built solution design document and hand it over the axe-wielding psychopaths who will be supporting and maintaining our applications.

And, of course, we'll produce all the other documentation our product owner asks us to if she create documentation-related items and prioritises them in the product backlog.

RESOURCES

• Microsoft Learn: Create a solution blueprint for Dynamics 365 solutions
• FastTrack Solution Blueprint presentation template
• Write unit tests with FakeXrmEasy

Support the show

CONNECT

🌏 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

#123. Learn how to use sprint goals to communicate to your stakeholders what your team has committed to building this sprint. If you can write your sprint goal in the subject line of the sprint review invitation to your stakeholders, and they stampede to accept your invite and beat down the door at sprint review, that's a great sprint goal.

This episode includes examples of sprint goals for Dynamics 365 and Power Apps projects and answers sprint goal questions like:

• What's the benefit for having a good sprint goal? 
• How do we write good sprint goals?
• How can we use sprint goals?
• Can we have more than one sprint goal?
• How do we create a sprint goal for lots of different unrelated items?

What sprint goal is your team working on? Let me know on LinkedIn.

CONNECT
🌏 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

#122. Ethan is a scrum master for a Power Platform team and his team is trying to build an app but the customer's product owner hasn't shown up yet! What should he do?

If your team's product owner is missing in action, in this episode you'll learn how to prevent this situation from happening, what to do to recover, and what could happen if you don't. 

Support the show

CONNECT

🌏 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

#121. What's it like trying to manage 10 Microsoft 365 tenants with hundreds of environments, apps and citizen developers. Rene Modery, Power Platform Technical Lead shares his journey at global advertising company, WPP. 

• Managing ten Microsoft 365 tenants for a global company with hundreds of subsidiaries.
• Power Platform environment policies and other guard rails to help makers.
• How do you know what apps have already been built and what problems have already been solved within a large organisation so that makers don't reinvent the wheel?
• Which data sources and connectors are proving to be the most popular in your Power Platform environments? SharePoint, Microsoft Lists, Excel, Azure SQL, Dataverse?
• Why Rene is not ready to ask makers to standardise on Dataverse quite yet.
• How the new Fluent UI controls will help app makers build apps that are better looking and more useful.
• If Rene could direct the Microsoft product teams to improve one thing, it would be...licensing!
• And he'd love to see some of the Center of Excellence features brought into the Power Platform Admin Center too.  
• And in person events are returning to the Power Platform user groups in Singapore.

Resources

• Rene Modery on Twitter
• Rene Modery on LinkedIn
• Rene's book, Hands-On Microsoft Lists
• Singapore Power Platform User Group

Support the show

CONNECT

🌏 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