Lindsay Shelton on The MVP Show

[Mark Smith]: 1:57
Today's guest is from Kansas City in Missouri, USA. She works at Stowars Institute for Medical Research as an application programmer. She was first awarded her MVP in2023. So, a fresher, so good to have you on the show. She's an experienced technology teacher with a demonstrated history working with primary and secondary education. She's a cat mom. I don't know if I'm a cat dad, I've only got two cats. You can find links to her bio and of course all social media in the show notes for this episode. Lindsay,welcome to the show.

[Lindsay Shelton]: 2:30
I'm very proud of you for getting the correct state for Kansas City that is difficult for even people from the United States to do. So it's confusing.

[Mark Smith]: 2:41
Wow, okay, okay. When I think of Kansas City, one,one of the very early MVPs in business applications comes from Kansas City. I don't know if you've met him. He's a, do you know,I can't believe this. If he listens to this, he's going to, I'm going to be in trouble, because I have just blanked on his name. That is so, so bad of me. But yeah, he did.

[Lindsay Shelton]: 3:04
He'll just edit this later.

[Mark Smith]: 3:06
I should just edit this piece out so he doesn't... man I can... it's like on the tip of my brain I can feel it there but it'll come to me as we're talking. Anyhow, tell us about Kansas City, tell us about Missouri and what do you do for food, family and fun? What are those things that you do when you're not doing your job?

[Lindsay Shelton]: 3:27
Well, for food, family and fun, all of those can really be answered by barbecue.That's really what we are known for and we talk a lot of crap about with other people. We take it very seriously. I don't know if you watched the show, Ted Lasso. It's about Jason Sudeikis plays a man from Kansas City who goes over and is coaching a... British soccer, you know, football league.And he, they'll like show his computer and it'll be Arthur Bryant's barbecue.And Arthur Bryant's will tweet about it every week. They're like, oh my gosh, they showed us in Ted Daso again. And,but everyone here, you know,we will fight anyone. If you say Kansas City is not the best barbecue,but then we will all fight each other about what's the best barbecue in Kansas City.And So I don't have a strong opinion about it because I didn't actually grow up eating barbecue.I was that bratty kid who'd be like, mom, just take me to McDonald's. I don't want to eat barbecue.It's gross.

[Mark Smith]: 4:37
Do you cook barbecue yourself?

[Lindsay Shelton]: 4:41
So I do now. I've grown and so now I enjoy barbecue. Some pulled pork,some brisket is really good.I like some pulled pork with a side of mac and cheese is my favorite.

[Mark Smith]: 4:53
Oh wow, so do you cook on coals or do you cook on propane?

[Lindsay Shelton]: 4:57
I don't cook at all.

[Mark Smith]: 5:00
No? You just eat it?

[Lindsay Shelton]: 5:01
I just eat it. I just go to the restaurants that do such a good job with it.

[Mark Smith]: 5:05
Ah, nice. Nice, nice. Tell us about your cats.

[Lindsay Shelton]: 5:09
Well, I have two kittens because I'm a crazy person. I have Charlie is seven months old and he is a little rapscallion. He's a tuxedo cat and he loves getting into everything. and he just keeps growing,getting bigger and bigger.I'm not really sure how much bigger he'll get,but every time I get him on screen during a work call, everyone's like,that's the same kitten you had? I know.And then just in February,I got his sister Trixie, so she's actually a year old,so she's just outside of kitten-dom, but she...She's just mostly trying to learn to figure out Charlie. He's a little aggressive.

[Mark Smith]: 5:58
so that's interesting yeah so I got my cats together and so they grew up together and they're one year old now so I've gone through the kitten phase and

[Lindsay Shelton]: 6:07
I do love that. I did have two ginger cats that were litter mates that I had for 14 years. And unfortunately, they both passed within six months of each other last year and this year. And so this is my evolution and reinventing myself as the new cat lady.

[Mark Smith]: 6:26
Nice, nice, nice.

[Lindsay Shelton]: 6:27
I was a ginger cat mom and now I'm just a cool cat mom. I don't know,I'm just a kitten cat mom, I guess.

[Mark Smith]: 6:35
Kittens are so much more entertaining than I feel mature cats right there because they are exploring into everything.The mature cats I mean I've noticed mine now starting to just they love lying in the sun all day long and they seem to spend their nights exploring.

[Lindsay Shelton]: 6:51
Oh my gosh,yes. From coming, going from two14 year old cats that were 16 and 18 pounds at their heaviest to having a kitten, like it's been a wild journey. And I actually, it's a good thing this isn't on camera. I'm still healing. I had some scratches just on my lip from Charlie. He was chilling on my shoulder, got spooked by something, jumped,and I had some scratches on my face.

[Mark Smith]: 7:19

Yeah. Wow. Wow.

[Lindsay Shelton]: 7:19

for Easter pictures. So, you know, just what you want.

[Mark Smith]: 7:22

Crazy. Crazy. Yeah. Tell me how, how was your journey? Because I understand you're a school teacher to start with.What was your journey to getting into tech?

[Lindsay Shelton]: 7:33
Uh, it's really a story about being at the right place at the right time and being open, just put making yourself open to opportunity at every chance because you never know what's going to turn into something. I um, I was a middle school English teacher is what I started out as and I spent six years reading just because I was grading 150 essays year round. So they asked me, they said, hey, you're doing a lot of stuff with Google Apps for Education.We see what you're posting about developing a paperless classroom and all of that. So would you like to teach Intro to Tech and Intro to Engineering?I was very interested in doing that. So I went and did that for the next four years, but it still didn't help with burnout with education in general. But it did give me a chance to start thinking like, huh, maybe this could actually be my exit strategy out of education. And so I tried applying for a year or two to get different jobs. It wasn't ever getting interview requests, didn't hear from anyone. And then I went to my cousin's future ex-wife's best friend's daughter's adoption party.It was the summer. I had nothing better to do and I said, well, you know, why not? This could be entertaining. And the cousins, future ex-wife hadn't gotten to the party yet. And so I didn't really know anyone there.I sort of knew the hostess of the party, but she was hosting the party.So I was sitting down at a picnic table talking to strangers, which is, you know, a little bit challenging for an introvert. But I get, I put on my extrovert costume and go out there. started talking to Sharon Weaver, who's a fellow MVP,and she ran an IT consultancy and really liked taking chances on people who were interested in tech but had non-traditional backgrounds. And so we exchanged information, we went to lunch. I worked for her part-time during that school year because obviously I was under contract then, you know, for the next upcoming school year. And by the time COVID ran into the school year,I was already, I had an offer letter from Sharon to come work for her full time. So I had two months of COVID teaching and then I was an IT consultant.

[Mark Smith]: 10:12
Wow, wow, that is incredible.So you totally moved out of teaching. Tell me then about how did you get into the Power Platform or Dynamics? Like what was that journey then for you?Where did you start? What was the kind of first exposure and then what's your journey been? So, I'm going to start with a question that I've been getting a lot of questions about. And I'm going to start with a question that I've been getting a lot of questions about. And I'm going to start with a question that I've been getting a lot of questions about.

[Lindsay Shelton]: 10:31
You know, that one's, it's been kind of a more subtle journey with that.I don't know that I can remember what my first, what was my first flow, you know, I don't know that I can pinpoint you to that exactly. I, you know, I'm, I was just looking for a tool to solve the problem. And that was actually my first speaking session that I came up with. You know, Sharon was always very encouraging of us to become speakers.And so I came up with a session about tracking your productivity through...Outlook categories and Power BI. So actually,that's the first Power Platform tool that I really spoke about or was engaged with heavily, even though that's probably one of the ones that I'm the least experienced with still.But I got a chance to go to Scotland and speak about that topic, which was really cool.Then Power Automate, I just started building flows. It just kept being the solution to problems we were having. And so I'd say, whoop, I'll just bring this out again.Oh, okay, let's just pull out this flow. And I just liked how logical it was and how I could just see the steps,do, do, do, do, do. And that really called to me. And it was through David Warner that I got an opportunity to go to the first Microsoft Power Platform Conference. It was kind of a last minute thing that I got this opportunity and my... work was encouraged me and said, all right, we'll pay for it, let's go. But at that point I was all in with Power Platform. Really the area I got really all in with was governance.Because I came back and I said, I'm going to get everyone at my institute into Power Platform just like me. Then I realized we had nothing in place in terms of governance at all. I could do anything I wanted, but so could anyone else. And so I kind of had to slow my roll and realize I need to become the governance person because no one else is gonna do it.And if I wanna get my friends building flows with me, this is what I've gotta do first.

[Mark Smith]: 12:40
So that's an interesting topic because, you know, when we look at organizations and they are starting to use the Power Platform more and more, often I find when I go in, it's been the Wild West, right?Everything has gone on in there.And you know what, an area I haven't focused on as in great detail is governance around Power Automate and Flows. So kind of Explain to me, what is governance when it comes to power automate?

[Lindsay Shelton]: 13:15
Well, I'd say the biggest considerations are going to be similar to governance around Power Apps and your other Power tools, where it's DLP policies is going to be the biggest one, because you've got to consider those connectors. Power Automate is all about the connectors.And so that was one of the first things that I did was I went through Microsoft's recommended list of connectors and separated out the business connectors for our personal productivity environment and set up a system where I said, okay, so if you want to get access to more connectors, we are making a makerspace. So if you do Power Platform training, a Power Automate101 training with me, then you get access to this makerspace and now you get access to say, hey, I want... this connector,but it says it's blocked by this DLP policy,you can ask and I'll research it if it looks, you know, not like a problem,I'll turn on that connector in the makerspace specifically. And so that's been kind of our tiptoe into it because adoption is now we're working on adoption now that we've got the governance in place.And then the environment strategy would be another thing to keep in mind, changing your default environment into a personal productivity environment,which I've discovered you have to put a whole lot more things. You have to keep a whole lot more things in that personal productivity environment than I'd like to.But I just keep running into different things that don't work outside of that main default environment.So as much as I'd love to have everything in a production environment.and all separated out and happy. It's just not going to work for every type of power automate flow that I've discovered.

[Mark Smith]: 15:09
Yeah, so I just want to pick up a couple of things you said there. One of them was around people requesting connectors.Are you talking about connectors to external data sets, so outside the firewall,therefore outside ownership of the organization?Are you talking more about, you know, we have a ERP system, let's say it's SAP or Oracle or something like that, and somebody is going, you know what,I want to connect it to that because...that system has data or it might be a research tool and that system has data that I don't have access to and I want to build an automation into it. What do you see?

[Lindsay Shelton]: 15:49
And I think that's going to be one of our biggest hurdles to adoption or one of our biggest ways that we can open doors to adoption is by getting more of that scientific data available for our employees to use. And that's something that we haven't quite gotten down yet.I know we have. like a data lake that we're experimenting with. And it's not exactly my forte, but I know the right people.So I think that if we could get some custom connectors in there, that we could say, hey, you've got some people data, you've got some department data.If we could start getting that useful data to them as it's rolling out,that would help a lot with our adoption. When I'm speaking about the connectors,I'm talking about things like, oh, I want to use Twitter right now that's locked down because no one's requested

[Mark Smith]: 16:47
Of course.

[Lindsay Shelton]: 16:48
to use it. And partially,I'm just curious, what is your bit, you know,I want to be a little bit big brother, but also what is your business use case for wanting to use Twitter? If it seems reasonable, then we'll go for it. But I think it's just to help.I mean, we want to keep an eye on what people are doing when

[Mark Smith]: 17:05
Absolutely.

[Lindsay Shelton]: 17:05
it's something coming out of our organization.

[Mark Smith]: 17:09
Interesting. Have you delved into the area of custom connectors at all?

[Lindsay Shelton]: 17:14
Yes, I was just actually demoing something with a custom connector behind it and not my last meeting for this data storage solution that we're working with. So we just haven't,again, rolled out our custom connectors to the environment as a whole. But it's something we'd like to be able to do and be able to work on. This is one with a custom API where they said, you know, it's a product we're demoing and trying out. And they had said, well, okay, so if you want people to ask for a new tag that they could tag their data with,they just need to ask an administrator.And I said, that's dumb.They're just going to email the administrator.That's not the right way to do that.And so I took their existing APIs and was able to put them into custom connectors pretty easily.And then was a, you know,the hardest part was just architecting how do those requests work because it was a request that took a token.But then you can't use a bearer token as authentication for the custom connectors when it's certain types of custom connectors. And it's, so it was a little messy. And so I had to go back and forth and find some little hacks to make it work the way I wanted to, but. Yeah, so we've got it working where someone can go into a Power App and say, I want this tag and hit the button and it will send an approval to an administrator.

[Mark Smith]: 18:50
Another thing you mentioned there was using flows for personal productivity as opposed to, you didn't say this,so what I see it used a lot for is a business process needs to be implemented.So, you know, the steps are carried out inside the organization. In that business productivity space. What are you seeing as the You know, if I asked you for what were the three to five key things that you've observed that people do around personal productivity and power automate,what are they?

[Lindsay Shelton]: 19:24
Well, I haven't gotten, I have a few, my little makers that I've worked with, they're not little,they're just little in my, because they're in my heart.My makers that I've worked with, I'd say what really they're looking for is just a way to make it simpler, you know?They're okay with a little bit of back-end work if they can. streamline their processes and streamline the processes also for other people. So it's,they're willing to put in the work to help other people. One of the people that I have been working a lot with and who's, he's made I think 12flows last time I checked.He is a training coordinator for one of the departments and so he's trying to make things easier for his trainees. and sending things out. And so I think that's just kind of the moral of every story is how can we make this easier,simpler, more streamlined?But how can we do that in a way that's not taking so much work on the back end that it makes it not worth it anymore?How much is a good amount of time to invest in something that will streamline a process where we're not just spinning our wheels? or spending days stuck on a flow, at what point is it not worth it anymore?

[Mark Smith]: 20:55
Yeah, yeah. Lindsay, it's been so good talking to you. The time has flown. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

[Lindsay Shelton]: 21:02
Yes, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.