Harnessing the Power Platform: A Journey with Michael Roth

Mark Smith: 0:31
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode, we'll be focusing on understanding the center of excellence in the Power Platform and really setting the scene for enterprise growth. Today's guest is from Germany. He's the manager of experience design at Avernart. He's crazy about learning and his superpower is kindness. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. As always, welcome to the show, Michael

Michael Roth: 1:17
Hi there, thanks for having me. I'm a little bit nervous, I do have to admit. My superpower is kindness. What does that come from?

Mark Smith: 1:26
It comes from your GitHub repository. You've got there that your superpower is kindness.

Michael Roth: 1:32
Right, I put this in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Funny. I think there was a quote from Chris Huntingford I got once when I met him.

Mark Smith: 1:42
Awesome, that is so cool. I love it. Kindness is so important. Yes, I love it. That's your superpower.

Michael Roth: 1:52
Yeah, yes, do you have to use the GitHub more? It's been a little bit quiet up there in my repository lately, but yeah.

Mark Smith: 2:01
I like your profile there. It jumps out. You see, a lot of GitHub is very boring and stale. Yours actually pops, so I did enjoy it. Before we drill into what we're going to chat about today, tell me a bit about Michael. Tell me what you do when you're not working. Yeah, I often give the 3Fs food, family and fun. What do they mean to you? I'll let you riff on that.

Michael Roth: 2:29
Food, family and fun that are three great Fs actually. I would start with family actually, because this is really important to me. I do have two little goats they are three and five now, so really small and I do love to spend time with my kids. This is actually two goats. This is a huge part of my life actually, and when I think about what I do for fun, I'm one of those crazy people who do what they do at work Also for fun, like closing down your work laptop, opening up your fun laptop and do the same thing over again. But I realized, since I have kids, that I do have to have like a hard line, a hard cut, like there's work, there's work work, there's fun projects at work, but there are kids and they always come first. And so family this is a big F. It's a very important one actually. Yeah, food, actually that you mentioned it is another. I was just talking with a co-worker today. Food is really important for me. I was talking with a co-worker today and we were talking about traveling, traveling the world like backpacking style. That's what we do, what we like and she was asking me how do you pick your countries where you want to travel to and I just said well, it's all about the food. I travel for food and stay for the country and for the mentality and the people, but I go for the food. So I cook a lot at home and now I can combine two apps. Actually, I cook a lot with my girls. They're still small but I try to include them as much as I can like into the whole process of cooking food, preparing food and eating. That is actually the huge parts of my life. And if you would just have asked me, what do you do in your free time, I wouldn't have thought about it, because do you know that when you ask somebody, even somebody asks you. So what do you do for fun? Wait, who am I? What's my name? Again, what do I do? Damn it. But yeah, that's a great introduction. So food and family, that's a and those two things beside, work actually brings me fun. This is what I do for fun. I like it. I just realized I have a bunch of hobbies, but I have way too less time actually to fulfill them.

Mark Smith: 4:50
Give me a copy of Top Hobbies, my.

Michael Roth: 4:52
Top Hobbies would be drawing and doing art, like painting, drawing, graphic design, something like that. It's number one Nice. Number two is playing guitar. I would say Hmm, very cool. And I'm just getting back into one of my old hobbies, and this would be cycling. I love to go downhill cycling and all this kind of rough fun. I really like that. But I just get back into that because I took a break after the kids were born. I was like this is a dangerous hobby maybe, and I'm getting old now I have responsibilities for my kids, so maybe slow down a bit. But the kids are getting bigger now. This is more than three years already, so I can get back into that stuff.

Mark Smith: 5:41
Yeah, so good, so good. Of the countries you visited which, if I said you know, here's $10,000, you can go back there for the week which country would you choose? Vietnam, it's super easy.

Michael Roth: 5:57
I don't have to think the food, the food is really amazing and there was the first reason I got there initially. But when I got there I met the people and I had some struggles because I don't speak Vietnamese or any related language and many of the people that I met there and as I mentioned earlier, I'm trying like a backpacking style you don't visit the big cities but you meet people from like the countryside. They don't speak English or German, for that matter and then you have to communicate with hands and signs and gestures and something like that, and I really liked that and all the people met. They were so kind. They're inviting me, sharing the food and family, their stories and then just creating a good time and I enjoyed that so much. That really stood out for me, like from all the countries I visited.

Mark Smith: 6:54
That's so cool. That is so cool, I love it. I love it.

Michael Roth: 6:57
But I haven't visited all the countries yet, so there are still many to go.

Mark Smith: 7:02
Oh, how many is what's on your bucket list? What are the ones that you definitely want to see next?

Michael Roth: 7:08
What I really want to see is Argentina We'll have to go there for wine, maybe and the countryside. I really, really, really want to go to Nepal, if it's possible at some point.

Mark Smith: 7:28
And.

Michael Roth: 7:28
I do have to visit. Well, I've been there Norway. I've been to Oslo a couple of times, but actually when I was in university I started to learn Norwegian, and I've just visited Norway two times for Microsoft events now and I would really like to travel the country to see. It's a long country, which like a lot of order, and I would really like to see that. And, as we are talking right now, I've never been to New Zealand, neither Australia, and that is something that's like an unknown world. You just realize what's in the internet, and the internet says everything in Australia wants to kill you, tries to kill you. So this sounds adventurous and interesting, yeah.

Mark Smith: 8:17
I lived in Australia for four years and you're still alive and I never saw a spider, which is the number one thing that people freak out about.

Michael Roth: 8:25
Absolutely.

Mark Smith: 8:26
And I only once saw a snake, a big black snake, and I was in a four by four vehicle driving through a forest, so I wasn't like anywhere close to me and those are the only two things that could kill me. That, and I never really encountered them for four years.

Michael Roth: 8:43
So what are you saying? Is not everything I read on the internet is true? That's a bold statement.

Mark Smith: 8:50
Well, here's the thing. Here's the thing. It's a bold statement All those things will kill you in Australia if you, if you encounter them. So. So this is a thing is that when you live in a city like I was living, I think, 25 stories up in an apartment block snakes don't get up there, and either do spiders. Really they don't, you know, hang out at that kind of altitude. So that's the probably the reason I didn't really live in the suburbs or anything like that. So which is where you hear the stories come, you know people pulling their curtains back and there's a big huntsman spider which is as big as your hand. But it's not that that, that that specific one won't kill you. But then I remember talking to the guy from Microsoft and he was like, oh, he was just looking at the edge of the deck on his house and there was a big snake python snake living down there and I was just like you know, I couldn't have that, I couldn't live with snakes that close at all.

Michael Roth: 9:51
Yeah, so maybe it's not only about the country but the environment where you are right now. Yeah, maybe it's more than the internet says.

Mark Smith: 10:01
Yes, yes, yes, yes, the internet is sensational.

Michael Roth: 10:05
Oh yes.

Mark Smith: 10:06
Tell me about, as we should guess and talk about. You know how do you go about setting up the power platform to scale in organizations, and I don't want to, if you like, focus on on tool sets per se. But when, when, when you take on a new customer or you might be even in the discovery phase with a new customer what are you thinking about? What are you, what are you going to ask? What are you going to look for to understand where this customer is at now and where you kind of based on, perhaps, where they want to go? Or often, you know, if I look at my experience, customers don't know where they want to go. They've heard something about this could solve a lot of problems, and so a lot of what you're doing is is educating on the art of the possible. You know where you are now to where you'll be in 12 months, 24, 36 months time with the technology. Tell us about your thinking process.

Michael Roth: 11:10
Well, you just said that Customers often don't know where they want to go, and they heard things on the internet Like have you heard about Power Platform? That is like a cool thing right now. Have you heard about Co-Pilot? That's in your hot shit right now? Yeah, so there is Power Platform. We want to do Power Platform. That is often what I hear from customers. And well, I think it's not about the tools and the techniques or like the shiny new things. It's about the business case really. And right now, where I come in is when my customers say, okay, we have this awesome idea and we are a Power Platform and let's do this. So what would your Power Platform approach be to our business case? And usually what I hear when I talk to customers, they talk to, like, people from sales and presales before and they were pitching ideas and I don't want to step on anyone's toes here. But if somebody from sales tells me there's a customer there like this business case and we can solve this with Power Platform, please, michael, go in there and solve this with Power Platform, I usually start with, okay, let's pretend I don't know what this is all about. I haven't listened to sales or what you said, so please can you explain what is your problem, and I don't want to hear your solution or what you think you might need or what the cool thing about Power Platform is. What is your problem really? And then I have an approach that works really well, and that is something like a joke. Do you know the difference between a doctor and a consultant? When a doctor finds a spot that hurts, they usually stop pressing. If a consultant finds a spot that hurts, they increase the pressure and really dig into that and that is something when a customer explains what their business case is, that's where they start and then it's okay, no, but what's your problem? What do you want to solve? And if I find a spot that they say, yeah, I don't want to talk about that much, let's focus on the cool thing like Power Platform with shiny, it's new and stuff like that. And I said, no, no, no, let's take back a step to that you don't want to talk about, because that's usually where the problem is and where the root cause is actually, and that is. I usually don't want to talk about the symptoms, but what's causing those symptoms, and dig a little bit deeper. So from my background I do come from not from a technical background, but I come from organizational development, where I talk to people a lot and we talk about organizational structures and team structures and team setups, and this is where I usually start looking for problems, for things that annoy people for things that really annoy you in your typical work, in your day-to-day work, because that is where I think Power Platform really shines. It's not the complicated business case, the critical business case, but it's the day-to-day work that really sucks sometime, like fill out that extra sheet, put it in the email, send it over to the next department. They get this number, so I'll put it into a different system. Yada, yada, yada. That's where I usually start digging around.

Mark Smith: 14:23
Yeah, yeah, makes sense. When do you have the scenario Because I know that one of the areas that you're quite strong on is around governance with a Power Platform. When you then you know you've bought into a company because of use case and you've uncovered what that is, and then you turn to okay, let's look at the platform. Where do we go now from the platform perspective? First of all, tell me typically or generically, however you want to do it what do you find when you first take a look at what's been going on inside the Power Platform? Tell me some of those stories that you tell about what you discover, what's been going on, and then I'm going to get you to talk about what's the path to structure, governance and things like that from that point.

Michael Roth: 15:26
Before I go into the topics or the things that I discover, I would cycle a little bit back actually to some of the Microsoft approach to sell the power platform. You know it's pointy, pointy, clicky, clicky, it's easy, low code, no code, everybody can do this. This is the whole story point. And I don't like that because all the customers, they go all in hey, that's cool, that's new, everybody can do this. Now let's try it out. And I do like people who like, don't hesitate, don't overthink, but go into it and try things out. I do like that. But then there's a point where I come in and they say, hey, we clicked a bit around and we tried it for a little bit and we thought, maybe we need a plan. We need to think what do we want to achieve with the platform? Well, not too many customers say that they're like now we think we need a plan and they say, okay, let's think first, what do you want to achieve? What do you want to utilize the platform for? And then I'm going to ask what have you done already? What's going on in your tenant right now? I say nothing too much. A few flows, maybe a canvass app. That's what we tried. And I think, since Power Pages was announced, I'm like, okay, what do you have? Do you have AI models, power Pages and portals or whatever? And they usually say no, no, there's just a couple of people, five to six people clicked around a bit and nothing too fancy. And then usually we install the CUE, just take a look under the hood and what's going on, and then we find like 20 Power Pages. There are dozens of AI models, so there's way more than they expect and it's like, okay, maybe we need to talk, maybe we need to think about what happened and how is your approach with the Power Platform? I know Microsoft says it's easy, everybody can do this, and that's the point everybody can and everybody will do this, because there are many people out there who are curious and if I see a shiny button, I click it. Many people are the same and they see the button. This is called Power Automate. What's that? It's power in the name. So I need to click that and try out what's happening there. So I can't blame anyone for trying things out and clicking around and see what happens. That's what I do usually. Let's try it out and find out. But that's usually the point where it comes to well, let's say governance or let's say okay, like let's take a quick stop here, take a deep breath and think about what we want to achieve. Where do we want to go? Because this is usually there's a fuss about new tools, about new tech. It's shiny, it's exciting, but it's all tech in the end and we stop. I think we should stop thinking about features of tech and think about the business problem. What business model? What do we do actually and what do we want to achieve? As much as I like playing around with new toys, so yeah, that's usually what happens. And this is like the all time favorite story, like do you use PowerPages? Nope, not at all. Oh well, look at that, there are 212 in there. That was what happened, and I think in the last project I had something like they had around 30 makers, so not too, many and they're building as quite a huge company, actually a global enterprise, and I said, okay, this is not, this is just a reasonable amount. If you just started out like 30 people playing around with it, that's fine. So I don't expect too many objects like apps and flows and whatnot. And we found over 700 canvas apps. I was like, okay, 30 maker and 700 canvas, that's a lot. And then we looked into the details and there was one maker in particular and she was very busy because she made 600 of those apps. I was like, okay, what's going on here? Wow, turned out she just made one app, but she wasn't aware of versioning, so she was saving a new version of the app, like a different file, over and over again 600 times. That was really eating up storage capacity. Yeah yeah yeah, that are those stories that happen if you don't know what's going on in your tenant, and it's easy to miss what's going on because it's so easy and everybody can do that. We just go to the one end, but it can be like kind of fatal sometimes.

Mark Smith: 19:50
On the other hand, yeah, so what's your pathway for them?

Michael Roth: 19:57
Well, first of all, we discover that and we see there is way more going on that you would expect. So that is the point where the customer usually really wants to get busy. Okay, let's do something, let's keep it all together, let's come up with rules and guidelines, and how can we monitor and like it's getting hectic and busy? That's the point where I usually tend to slow down again and say, okay, before we do anything, we need a goal, a vision. Where do we want to go? What do we want to achieve with the platform? Because if we don't have a goal, we can't define any steps. That leads us toward this goal. So, and I really like to and I don't know if it's mean, but sometimes I like to take this energy of this oh my God, what's happening in my tenant? I didn't have a clue what's going on. I like to take that energy and to put that into the part that's not the technical part, but define a vision. Let's talk about your mission and where you want to go with a platform like citizen developer approach, fusion teams or just like replace legacy applications, something like that. Let's talk about this for a moment before we get all technical again. Yeah, sometimes I do have the idea that I slow down the customer again and again To say, okay, let's think before we act. Actually it's good. Yeah, I'm working well there, I'm having fun actually yeah.

Mark Smith: 21:26
So where you take them from that point and you've set a vision, you've set a pathway. What's your process to get them to a? We're now in a position where we've cleaned up what's going on and we now can build what a kind of what is a baseline you feel the organization is ready now to move forward with, with starting to scale. What does that baseline look like for you that you want, from a platform perspective, in place? What are the guardrails that you want in place? What are the design patterns that you want in place? What are those things that you want to see that is now taken this organization and put it in a position that says, okay, you now have a platform that you can start meeting multiple of your business goals on.

Michael Roth: 22:23
Okay, first, I would like if we have that goal and then we have the point in time where we said, okay, we've cleaned up. I just want to make sure that this is like. This can take some time, because usually the mess is quite a lot. So the way you said, it just seemed like okay, we've seen what's going on. We have a goal, then we clean it up and then we go. But this is usually like long process, right, because there is things going on and the platform is in usage right now usually, and so we can't stop on that, we can't put a hard stuff on that. So, but yeah, let's skip that part and let's say, okay, what's how to scale, how to go on? And I think that differs from customer to customer, from use case to use case, because there are large enterprises who say, okay, when we utilize the platform, we want this citizen developer movement and we want to support them with, for example, first level support. But not every organization can deliver that kind of what you need for first level support for, let's say, even 50 makers. They do have questions, like every day, and when I remember back in my beginnings with Power Platform, when I designed my first Canvas ever, like, I had a question every five minutes and I can't raise a ticket any five minutes. So the point is that I want the organization and, if I have a Power Platform administrator or, even better, a Power Platform administrator team, because I'm really like to quote from the Microsoft Governance White Paper this is a teamwork job.

Mark Smith: 23:53
This is not a single player game.

Michael Roth: 23:56
Usually we try to envision what's your vision, what's your goal, where do you want to be? How do you think? Like the makers, they are doing the thing and they're finding awesome business solutions for their everyday problems. You don't have to take care about that. This is great. And then there's a question, for example, around support. Can you have an SLA or support in any kind of way? So, yeah, we can do that. And we say, okay, now let's think about your 30 makers, now let's think about your 300 makers. Can you still deliver the support? And it's like I don't know. I do have a job, because that's another issue. Actually, most Power Platform admins that I know they've been in the wrong meeting at the wrong time and boom, suddenly they are Power Platform admins and this is like on top, on the day-to-day job. So it's kind of a difficult situation for Power Platform admins, but for them usually, because they struggle. I like to give them an idea of something that I've been talking about this year a lot. This is called Power Platform the bare minimum. What is the bare minimum in terms of governance? What you need to have done at least so that the tenant is secure. From there, you can build it up step by step and look what's your business case? How many makers do you have? Citizen developer, few teams, what there is there so many options and possibilities to go with the platform. From there you can build up, but you need to have this baseline and maybe they will answer your question. What is this baseline? What does it look like? I usually start with a bare minimum of tenant settings Like, for example, tenant isolation, self-service purchase. This is quite a sneaky one actually. Just think about do you want it enabled? Do you want to have a handle on it and to limit it to who is able to create new environments due to DLP, like who is really to be in the position to create how we want to use the platform, not how to work in the platform, but how to get set the rates in the platform. That is just your team or everyone who is basically an administrator, for example. So kind of talent settings. From there we go to environment strategy. Like what would you be your talent to look like? How do you want to shape it? And it's absolutely okay to start with I don't know two or three environments. Microsoft had this North Star architecture guideline somewhere where you have like multiple environments, all with DLP's and different security roles and it's really confusing and a lot to take in. And I always say it's okay just to start with two or three environments. You got your default. You got an environment for your I don't know your administrator crew. That's the perfect place to start, so you don't have to come up with a full blown experience and you don't have to think it all through. Start at some point and then you can build up from that and with environments, there come the question about data loss prevention policies. The more environments you have, sometimes a lot of customers thinks the more DLP's you need. But I think there's really one golden rule is that you need at least one tenant wide data loss prevention policy. So wherever your user gets a new environment from from a trial experience, from a community plan, whatever, they should be covered by at least one DLP. So that you have an idea. Talking about DLP's, the Power Platform is growing rapidly. You know that. So we have over 1,000 connectors right now and it feels like every week there's a new connector being published, very important, like set the default group for new connectors, maybe to blocked, so you have a chance to look into what's published so that you have a grip on what's going on right now. So these are the tenant settings, environments, data loss prevention policies. This is like bare minimum. And from there I'd like to add on to say to talk early about security groups and roles, because this is something that many people often overlook and the power of that. And they even meet customers who have like multiple environments and data loss prevention policies and they have the feeling like this is already going great. And then I get a guest account and I get a Power Platform license and I see 30 to 40 environments and like am I supposed to? see all those or do? Should I act like I don't need to know basis, Like what's important for me? Let's pretend I'm a citizen developer. I have 40 environments. I have no idea where to start. What am I going to do? And I usually close with the most important topic, and this is something that I, at the beginning, said. This is a secret topic, we don't have to talk about that yet, but it's the most important one, so we reveal it at the end, and this one is I just give the headline it's called documentation. Everybody knows what this is about, because everyone likes to read God's documentation, but nobody likes to write good documentation. And as we were talking about things being on the internet, I said I've just read on the internet that every time you can't provide a document, a governance document, a kid dies. Once again, this is just something I read on the internet. I don't know if it's true, but I assume it is. So this is the harsh truth. Actually, whatever you have, wherever you start, wherever you're at right now, write it down, because they are common people, they're starting people and you have, like you don't know who's going to be the next Power Platform administrator, who is the lucky person, but write down what you have and wherever you are. It's no shame if you just start out we all start somewhere and some when but write it down and that makes it easier. And this is kind of the bare minimum settings that I often talk about.

Mark Smith: 29:52
I like it. I want to unpack, just I mean, I know we're already on time and have you created any formalized way of capturing documentation? When you start to get large, it is enlarged. So what I mean by a formalized way is that if you've got 300 makers, you would have potentially 300 different ways of writing documentation Absolutely, some being absolutely nothing to some being over the top. How do you standardize and publish in a consistent manner documentation? Have you seen anything? Is anybody doing any tooling that does that effectively and consistently?

Michael Roth: 30:34
Hardly, I do have to say. This is still a difficult topic, especially for a citizen developer, because citizen developer are not, don't have the idea how to write documentation, they're not trained, they're not schooled unless and this is difficult. I've seen a few tools one or two in GitHub that capture all the steps and actions that Flow contains, for example, and put that out as documentation, but this is more or less a technical documentation. What I've done recently a lot is I talk to customers and they come with an organizational solution for that that every citizen developer has come to read the terms and conditions for part of the form. And that includes that, yes, I have read and understood those terms, and that means every flow, every app needs at least a title that says what it does and the description that takes it further, so that, even if I'm another citizen developer and discovering a flow on app, or if I'm an administrator, I have to work with it, that at least I have a fair chance to see what this does, and I don't want to see a flow that is more test one, two, three or something else.

Mark Smith: 31:51
Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, yes.

Michael Roth: 31:52
Descriptive description and a title is the least that you have to provide, and then it really depends on how you want to use the platform in your organization and how strict and firm you are. So and I'm German I do love rules and regulations and stuff.

Mark Smith: 32:15
I love it. I love it, michael. This has been so interesting talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. That was really nice. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP, mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you would like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeocoffeecom. Forward slash. Nz365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.