#80. Richard asks about working with user stories in a Dynamics 365 or Power Platform agile project.

I'll spend this episode talking about user stories on Dynamics 365 and Power Platform projects and I’ll share three traps to avoid when working with user stories when building Power Platform and Dynamics 365 apps using Scrum.

• The first trap is the level of detail. 
• The second trap is splitting and combining stories.
• The third trap is managing changes to the backlog of users stories.

Resources

• User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development 
• User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product 
• Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
• Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
• Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
• Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy

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

#79. Bonus extended interview with CJ Brooks, a Fundraising and Engagement Architect at Mission CRM as we talk about how Mission CRM closed the doors on their consulting practice to focus on building the Mission CRM fundraising and engagement application for nonprofit organizations. In this bonus episode, CJ and I try to solve the Elon Musk problem in data verse.

Resources

CJ Brooks on LinkedIn
MISSION CRM on LinkedIn
MISSION website
Demo: Dynamics 365 Fundraising & Engagement

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

#78. Join me with CJ Brooks, a Fundraising and Engagement Architect at Mission CRM as we talk about how Mission CRM closed the doors on their consulting practice to focus on building the Mission CRM fundraising and engagement application for nonprofit organizations. 

Make sure you stick around until the end of this episode to find out how you can get access to the bonus episode with Neil Benson and CJ Brooks extended interview.

Our discussion covers:

• How Mission CRM took a step back and pivoted to create an application.
• How Mission CRM adapted to Microsoft's not for profit accelerator soon after the release of their not for profit products.
• Striking the balance between agile software development and well structure dev ops.

If you'd like to hear that bonus extended interview, please make sure you subscribe to the Amazing Apps show in your podcast player and set it to download new episodes automatically.

Resources

CJ Brooks on LinkedIn
MISSION CRM on LinkedIn
MISSION website
Demo: Dynamics 365 Fundraising & Engagement

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

#77. Bonus extended interview with Bert Wijns, a Global Solution Strategy Architect a Microsoft and co-founder of Power Accelerate as we talk about the tool he created which allows you to take a screenshot of a legacy application or database schema and have a Power App built in a few minutes with the legacy data migrated. Sound crazy? Listen on to hear more about Bert Wijns' Power Accelerate.

Resources

• Bert Wijns on LinkedIn
• Power Accelerate on LinkedIn
• Power Accelerate website
• Power Apps Screenshot Modernization
• Power Accelerate Intro 
• Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
• Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
• Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
• Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy

Transcript: AmazingApps26Bonus.wav transcribed by Sonix | Automatically convert audio and video to text | Sonix

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

#76. Join me with Bert Wijns, a Global Solution Strategy Architect a Microsoft and co-founder of Power Accelerate as we talk about the tool he created which allows you to take a screenshot of a legacy application or database schema and have a Power App built in a few minutes with the legacy data migrated. Sound crazy? Listen on to hear more about Bert Wijns' Power Accelerate.

Make sure you stick around until the end of this episode to find out how you can get access to the bonus episode with Neil Benson and Bert Wijns'  extended interview.

Our discussion covers:

• Being a Microsoft employee at the same time as starting another company.
• Alternative channels to screenshots that can be used as a starting point for the time-saving Power Accelerate process.
• Current size limitations of Power Accelerate and how they can be overcome.
• The roadmap from private preview to GA and beyond for Power Accelerate.

If you'd like to hear that bonus extended interview, please make sure you subscribe to the Amazing Apps show in your podcast player and set it to download new episodes automatically.

Resources

• Bert Wijns on LinkedIn
• Power Accelerate on LinkedIn
• Power Accelerate website
• Power Apps Screenshot Modernization
• Power Accelerate Intro 
• Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
• Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
• Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
• Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy

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

#75. Join me with Haniel Croitoru, Associate Director of Protiviti, a Technology Consulting solutions provider in Toronto, Canada.  Haniel shares a story about one of his power platform projects for a not-for-profit client and shares the lessons learned about multi-language deployments, implementation approach, executive sponsorship, and change in user adoption. 

Our discussion covers:

• The importance of strong project sponsorship in projects that drive a lot of organisational change.
• Refining knowledge gained on a project, writing about it, presenting it, clarifying it, and making it available for others via AppSource.
• Using common language analogies to explain SharePoint concepts and bring them to life.
• Easing the challenges of change management and adoption by supporting early adopters with the aim of smoother sailing as they become champions in the user community.
• Staggering rollouts instead of releasing them all at once to ease the stress for users who do not deal well with change.

It was great to hear how he's designed a solution for multi-language, Power Apps user interfaces, his agile approach to building business applications, and how he addresses change management and user adoption in his projects.

Resources

• Haniel Croitoru on LinkedIn
• Haniel Croitoru on Twitter
• Protiviti on LinkedIn
• The United Church of Canada
• My online Scrum for Microsoft Business Applications training course
• AppSource
• Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
• Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
• Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
• Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy

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

#74. Join me with Vasco Duarte who runs Oikosofy a coaching company in Finland and is also behind the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. Vasco is the author of a fascinating book, #NoEstimates. Vasco and I chat about the challenges of estimating complex business application software, particularly in the CRM and ERP domains, and how the No Estimates movement and the method covered in his book can help business applications teams construct collaborative contracts with their customers and never deliver late again. 

At the end of this podcast episode, I give details on how you can win one of 14 copies of Vasco's book, the No Estimates book.

Our discussion covers

• The #noestimates movement and how the approach addresses the frustration of unreliable and late delivery on software projects.
• Alternatives to traditional estimation methodologies.
• Using the Extreme Contracts approach to create a win-win situation between vendors and customers.
• Educating Product Owners who may have never been involved in software development.
• Blink estimates, or rethinking what is delivered in a sprint to deliver customer value as quickly as possible.
• The "Clinton process" 
• Spike concept centred on solving a problem for the customer with the aim of delivering a solution in a very short time frame.

Resources

• Vasco Duarte on LinkedIn
• No Estimates book 
• Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
• Extreme Contracts - Jacopo Romei
• Agile Estimating and Planning training Mike Cohn 
• Maarten Dalmijn on Medium.com
• Scrum Master Toolbox Product Owner e-course 
• Neil Killick 
• Blink Estimation 
• The Clinton Process  - Clinton Keith on “No estimates and set-based design” – Blog post
• Raphael Branger on LinkedIn 
• Spike concept from extreme programming 
• Kent Beck on LinkedIn 
• Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
• Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
• Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
• Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy

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

#73. Daryl LaBar and Jonas Rapp, co-hosts of the XrmToolCast join Neil Benson to answer the questions about how to document complex systems when asked to "devise a roadmap for migrating a Dynamics CRM 2013 and a CRM 2016 environment into a single Dynamics 365 online environment ."

A documentation tools masterclass from two experts in the field who discuss what tools to use for on-premise implementations when Snapshot! for Dynamics 365 can’t be used.

Resources

• Daryl LaBar on LinkedIn
• Jonas Rapp on LinkedIn
• XrmToolCast Podcast
• Snapshot! for Dynamics 365
• XrmToolBox Plugin Registration Tool
• XrmToolBox Web Resource Tool
• XrmToolBox Attribute Usage Inspector
• XrmToolBox Metadata Document Generator
• Use Visual Studio Code to search for 'Xrm.'
• XrmToolBox Power Apps Solution Checker for XrmToolBox
• Entity relationship diagram generation tool in Visio 2016 SDK
• XrmToolBox Entity Relationship Diagram Generator
• UML Diagram Generator for XrmToolBox
• Visio Document Generator
• Diagrams.net
• Server Trigger Explorer from CDS.Tools
• Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
• Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
• Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
• Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy

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

#72. Michael Nunes asks, "When multiple systems are being delivered by different parties, I find that we have to design the details upfront, then use agile for the delivery of the Dynamics 365 systems. Is this your experience too?"

Michael's question has two layers that we address in this episode: upfront design and team composition.

Upfront design is based on three assumptions:

1. We can know all the requirements upfront.
2. We can design all the components upfront.
3. There won't be any changes.

We challenge those assumptions and investigate the drawbacks. Then describe an alternative approach: emergent design.

Nexus is a scaled Scrum framework used when there are multiple Scrum teams working on a single application. We discover how to reconsider the composition of developers in our scrum teams when scaling beyond one team.

Resources

• Michael Nunes on LinkedIn
• The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum (affiliate link)
• Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
• Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
• Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
• Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy

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

#71. Daniel Kerridge says, "I'm the only developer in my team so I just wondered if there's a special version of Scrum that works in that scenario."

There are three sets of accountabilities in the scrum team: the product owner, the scrum master and developers. But how many developers do you need?

In the previous version of the Scrum Guide, the recommended minimum number of developers to have a cross-functional team was three. But that minimum was removed from the 2020 Scrum Guide.

Guy's & St. Thomas's NHS Foundation Trust ran a successful project to implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 using a tiny scrum team. Find out how in this episode.

Plus three conditions to meet if you have a tiny scrum team.

Resources

• Daniel Kerridge on LinkedIn
• Ben Knipp on LinkedIn
• Amazing Applications podcast page on LinkedIn
• Amazing Applications podcast page on Podchaser
• Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery Academy
• Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery Academy

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