From Atomic Energy to Microsoft's FastTrack: Paul Mare's Insightful Journey and Guided Tour of Dynamics 365 Implementation

Mark Smith: 0:33
Welcome to the Power 365 show. We're an interview staff at Microsoft across the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Technology Stack. I hope you'll find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode, we'll be focusing on the Dynamics 365 Implementation Portal. Today's guest is from Munich, germany. He works at Microsoft as manager of fast-track expansion for Dynamics 365, f&o and CE. At heart, he's a project manager who loves people and a Dynamics 365 consultant who loves making his customers business more profitable by being client-centric. He's a storyteller, an avid photographer and a performing magician. Let's unpack that one. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, paul.

Paul Mare: 1:24
Thank you very much, Mark. I'm just thinking on the links. I will probably add maybe a card trick that I performed recently, because maybe we picked a few imaginations with that comment of yours. It's not often that I get to talk about magic when we're talking about Dynamics. I think it's fair to say, hanging your career on one product is a risky decision. I did that many years ago and the journey has been good and it has been absolutely magic. I'm still enjoying it.

Mark Smith: 1:55
I love it. I love it. Tell me then, before we get into the tech side of things, tell me about food, family and fun, because I find it interesting. You're in Germany, but I'm pretty sure you've spent time in Spain. Tell us a bit about your travels and food, family and fun.

Paul Mare: 2:14
Firstly, I'm a South African at birth. I've been living in Germany for the last while. I have grandchildren in Australia. I love traveling and I have to travel, as you can imagine. So recent travel that is still a high point for me is I took a bunch of European friends down to Botswana in Africa, and we did a real wild safari for three weeks. It was absolutely brilliant. No internet connectivity. I used to sit at the campsite, Elephants at the campsite, no fences between you and what's out there. It comes to food. I love cooking. I won't call myself a chef, but I'm active in the kitchen. I make a decent risotto. So winter food comfort food is generally going in that direction. In the summer it's South African style. We have a brye. Now. Brye is what we call, what the Australians will call a barbecue. Probably in America as well, Brye is the local word. English-speaking South Africans also use the word brye. It's an Afrikaans word but it's similar, except I only make fire with real wood, no charcoal or anything like that. I make a big fire. We sit around the fire, we cook together. We sit into the night chatting. We typically eat very late. Couple of cold beers on the mix. So that's my summer cooking.

Mark Smith: 3:39
Isn't barbecuing brye just such a fantastic way to entertain, like you say, and to do it on wood? I think is just the atmosphere of the fire, the food, the evening, the beer is just a great combination.

Paul Mare: 3:54
Indeed, we call the fire sometimes bush TV.

Mark Smith: 3:58
Yeah, nice, I love it. I love it. That's the Australian connections coming out.

Paul Mare: 4:03
I'd say it's actually the South Africa, is it really? The Australians are not allowed to make fire with wood because of the risk of forest burning etc. So my daughter lives there and I put here with a little bag of charcoal on a, I make a big fire.

Mark Smith: 4:23
Yeah, nice, nice. Tell me about your career journey and, ultimately, how you ended up at Microsoft.

Paul Mare: 4:29
Yeah, Okay, I've had a long career in IT. You know, I started working for the Atomic Energy Corporation many months ago and I had to get a security clearance for that job and I only realised many years afterwards that the South Africans had actually developed a technology to make an A-bomb. That was not said to anybody at the time, but I probably wrote some of the software that helped drive that, you know.

Mark Smith: 4:56
Wow.

Paul Mare: 4:57
Because you don't know what you're doing in your young days. The politicians take advantage, right. But anyway, I went into more commercial IT from that and at some point really started focusing on what I call client-centric solutions. You know, and when Microsoft came out with back then the Dynamics CRM 1.0, no less I noticed that coming to the market was really keen to play, thought it might be a long-term interesting topic. At that point I was already a great planes partner which was part of the technology that Microsoft bought that eventually went into the FNO stack. So I had a little bit of that history and Great Planes was bought by Microsoft just before that. At that time Microsoft were quite surprised that as a small partner I made such a strong play to be part of this thing. I managed to get two people on the airlift training in Nice in France flew them up. They came back and said Paul, wonderful concept, but it ain't a product yet. Unfortunately that version did not get released. 1.2 went to market. I was in pre-sales on 1.2 and then I luckily didn't sell one and I found my first customer just as CRM 3.0 was coming to the market. So I approached Microsoft say can I take my customer live on 3.0 on the day that you launch and I'll be your launch partner. They said yes, so I actually did the launch for CRM 3.0 on Microsoft behalf as a small partner, right? They then got me into do the version for launch and the version after that. I prepared the launch, but that was the first one that they did themselves and we did pretty well as a small CRM partner. If I roll forward a little bit, I think in about 2008,. We closed as a relatively small partner. We had the largest deals in EMEA for the entire partner channel that year. It was quite good. One was Sun International Casinos and the other one was First Bank of Nigeria. These were two mega deals back then. So we suddenly became President Circle, inner Club, all that stuff, right, and you meet people, of course, in the process I started working more and more with Microsoft people in pre-sales on big deals that we were doing. I was speaking at Microsoft events, et cetera. And then one day a dear colleague now although he's retired now pink me as he says Paul, do you want to come and work with Microsoft? We have a job for you. And I said you know what? I'm not the kind of guy that works for a 120,000 person company. I'm an entrepreneur. I start a small company, I grow 200 people, sell it, start afresh. That was my mode. So he emails me the job spec. So I look at it and the first line says location, not specific. I go well, that's interesting. What does that mean? I call back and he goes well, paul, if you pick any location in Europe, it has to have a big airport in a Microsoft office. You can pick that as your work location. So I thought great three-year adventure, told my wife. We left South Africa, came to Germany. Three years went by pretty quickly. We had great fun, not the least of all, the Microsoft share price was starting to do well, so I had to leave some money on the table if I had to leave, and really we were having great fun seeing the world. So then suddenly I had to care about my career again. I was doing presales for three years. It was like a holiday. I love presales, by the way, but couldn't do that forever. I was put ceiling doubt, joined the Fast Track team back then and spent seven years as a Fast Track solution architect before I took over the expansion team about a year and a half ago. So that's my brief look back into the past and how I got here. Dynamics all the way.

Mark Smith: 8:41
Wow, this is an amazing story. It's a nostalgic story too for me. I started with CRM 1.2 and I implemented 1.2. In the company I was working for. I was the first customer in New Zealand at the time, and so I find it very interesting. I had no idea that CRM, which MSCRM back then 1.0 didn't get released. I thought it did, but it didn't. Because I knew 1.2 came out the same year. It came out November, from memory that year, but I didn't realize 1.0 didn't go to market. I also find it interesting the comment that your colleagues made around it's a great concept but it's not ready. I get that. I totally understand that. It was Crystal Reports who remember was a reporting engine in it back then.

Paul Mare: 10:32
Oh man, it's scary to think back. And if you look at how wide the product is today, how many aspects of it Back, then in a month's time you could learn everything there is to know about the product and the experts and now I've been working with a product so many years and I have to admit that I'm a master of a few of the areas, but there's a lot of stuff that I just know a little bit of and it's just grown that wide. Nobody knows everything anymore.

Mark Smith: 11:02
Yeah, so it's so true, we're going to talk about Dynamics 365 implementation portal, but before we get there, you mentioned that for a massive period of time you worked as a fast track architect. Can you just explain what fast track is, why it was born inside of Microsoft and what is its aims and goals now, and how? Because ultimately, you know, we've seen in the community and I've got a couple on my team Fast Track Recognized Solution Architects that's flowing to a much broader program. It's probably seen as the premium qualification that Microsoft can bestow on an individual for architecting. You know phenomenal solutions, but can you tell the story of fast track Well?

Paul Mare: 11:51
let me turn the clock back a few years and then you see why fast track was necessary from our perspective. You know when the product arrived in the cloud and I'm talking now all up. You know the FNO side of the world and the customer engagement side of the world. We I'm going to take a pause there we can't say FNO in the public facing stuff right, right, okay, is it just finance now, if we? look at that time a few years back, couple of years back, when we take the finance and operations up into the cloud and we took the Dynamics 365 customer engagement in the cloud. The cloud is a different operating model to what we had on-premise. On-premise you do a big release, sometimes every three years, you know. In the cloud it started to happen every six months. That's a very high rate of change. There's a lot of new innovation coming and not every part of the project of the product is at the same level of maturity at any point in time. So we were finding at that point that a lot of what fast track was doing. They came initially as the sort of mega escalation team Customers are problem, it's just gone live, there's drama, right. What do we do In that process? We took our best architect small team and that team would go and do a deep dive, engagement, find the problem, work with their colleagues in engineering, solve it, get that customer happy, get that customer successful. And that team grew because the demand grew. They were doing a good job and said more and more people will reach out, and often on things that weren't burning as big as those earlier flames, but they still wanted the guidance and we saw the value. But we also saw something else Most of these firefights were avoidable. Sometimes it happens because there's a product issue and we have to acknowledge that it happens, but sometimes it also happens because the implementation team did not follow some of the more obvious best practices, like escalation. We've just gone live, the system is not performing, so did you guys do performance testing before the go live? No, the customer didn't want to pay for that, right. So what happens is you incur a risk, you ignore the risk and then the risk comes to feast right, and then it does cost money to resolve. So we changed our attack with FastTrack to say let's engage proactively in the earlier stages of an implementation project so that we avoid these last minute we're about to go live, or we've just gone live and now we have drama and now the fires are big. We still have to do that because we can't avoid all issues. So we still fight a few escalations, but in the early days it was 80 percent escalations, 20 percent proactive guidance. Now it is 80 percent proactive guidance and we avoid many of those escalations. As a consequence. There's a few that we still need to take care of. So that's the one brief of FastTrack Work with the partner to proactively guide the design, the architecture of the solution being put together and the governance that goes around that to ensure that we have successful delivery for the customer. So at heart we're driving customer success via the partner. In a worst case we look like the ordered police to the partner. In the best case we bring lots of value add and we have a good sparring game between ourselves in the partner to get the best solution out there. In the end the customer is the ultimate beneficiary of a good solution. We do have another subtle brief, though. Our second major objective is that we should gather feedback from all the projects that we engage in, curate that feedback consolidated and bring it back to our colleagues in engineering. We are already in engineering. So our voice, if I may say, if you log something on ideasdynamicscom, you have a voice, but that voice is not that strong because you're in a big mix of voices. If I curate a lot of feedback coming from many different partners, many different projects, and I put a position, I have a better chance of getting the program manager to say, hey, we'll put that into the project. So in our roles, and it's a proud contribution that a lot of us have made. We go that feature in the product. I was instrumental in landing it. I brought the customer evidence for that. That was a great satisfaction for me and it's an ongoing. Key part of the journey is doing that. In a way, the FastTrack Architect to the implementation team looks like engineering, because we are baffled to engineering. The engineering needs to cut product, so they can't talk to you the whole time. So we'll bring them in when needed and we'll talk to you in the meantime. We'll take your messaging back to them. When I go back to them, I look like the partner and the customer to them. So I'm the middleman. I get shot from both sides but we try and balance that and nurture the relationships on both sides. That's how we are successful in the end. So that's FastTrack in a nutshell. We have limited capacity. Of course, I cannot support every project that's out there. So now, when we look at how we support implementation guys, we started by taking the really big, really complex projects. In our terminology we'd say the ones with license revenue above 300,000K. Now, license revenue is a bad proxy for complexity. We use money because it's easy to measure, but we really after complex and we know it's a bad proxy, by the way, but it's a way to filter and say we will support these projects are illegible. We have capacity and if I run out of capacity I can lift to 300 to 350. Right, so I can manage my capacity. But then and this is a lead in eventually to the portal we say but we are now cherry picking some projects and bringing good value as fast track to those projects, but actually, should we not be bringing value to everybody? Now, you can't bring value to everybody in exactly the same way. The fast track engagement is intense. There's an architect that works on your project with you. That's an intense engagement. But can we not work with core teams at a partner? If I have a large partner that plays globally, can they not establish a center of excellence and I work with them and they drive the best practices and they de-multiplex for me all the issues coming from the individual projects and give me key topics that I can engage with. Now I have, instead of having low value conversations across many projects, I'm having high value conversations on topics we prioritize between us. How about going further down and this is your real lead into the implementation portal Is how about making it available in a self-service mode to everybody, and this is how we kind of went full journey. So let's start with a big fast track mission, but eventually spread out to reach everybody with the best practices for implementation in one form or the other.

Mark Smith: 18:56
So I know we're taking a long time to get to the point around the implementation portal, but I want to have one other question around fast track.

Paul Mare: 19:03
It's fair.

Mark Smith: 19:04
Docu-s-success by design. Right is a is a 7, 800 page tome around how to do it right. How important is that for particularly you know, architects, functional consultants, et cetera to understand what the benefit that that document brings to the market.

Paul Mare: 19:27
So I'll address two parts of it. The one part is going to be the tome and the other part is going to be the quality. So the quality and the quantity of it, right? So let's start with the quality of it. If I pick one topic from that book now, I've been a project manager for a large part of my career. I think the best guidance I've ever read for a project manager about how to implement a software product right, not custom development, but a software product is coming from the Dynamics 365 implementation guide. It actually doesn't even have anything to do with dynamics yet. It's neutral. It's just project governance. But it's to the point. And I challenge everybody do the table of content reading. Pick a topic that you have an interest in in that flip book, right? Just scan the pages on that and you'll notice the quality is really high, right? And so, if you think about FastTrack, we've done probably five, six, 7,000 projects in the last couple of years that we've accompanied. We've seen a lot of things go wrong in that process, and every time you see something go wrong you learn something, and that consolidated learning is reflected in that guidance, something that seems trivial Do you have a project sponsor on your project? Right, we all know we should have one. You know how many projects we see that failed because of that particular thing. So now I ask the question, and some of my big partners that run good-based practice get a little bit offended when I go do you have a project sponsor on your project? Right, and I get that. It's not always a high-value question, but we've seen the questions are there because we've seen projects fail right Now. That's where the quantity comes in the total success by design framework, the book about the Dynamics 365 implementation. That is a tome, you're right, but you should not read it end to end. You look at your role and I call it do table of content-based reading, right? Yes, I'm going to come back, circle back to it later when we talk about the portal and I'm going to help you do table of content-based reading. But this is my first recommendation If you're a project manager, if you are a functional architect that is implementing Dynamics 365, you're going to have to go far to find a better consolidation of the key practices. That will make the difference between success and failure. It may be overkill for your smaller projects. It's not going to be underkill for your big projects. We cover a lot right? So, in my view and I'm biased, of course my team helped write that, yes, but I do think it's one of the best sources of guidance all up that you can find in this space, right? If you combine that with the technical patterns, the architectural patterns that underpin the implementation, you've got cover of all the critical aspects. Maybe business process catalog is another one that you want to do a deep dive in. So I think there are some other sources that are important, but I still treat that as one of the most important sources. I do not expect anybody, though, to start on page one and read to page 734, right, this is clear. Scan the table of content, pick the topic that's relevant for you now on your project, do a quick read, do a deep dive when you find something that grabs your interest, and I'd be surprised if you don't find something that grabs your interest.

Mark Smith: 22:56
This podcast for what you just explained there has just been worthwhile. It's to get that kind of depth of perception of the success by design. I've been promoting it for well since it came out to a lot of the consultants I train and I just like the reinforcement you're provided on why it's so important. Let's shift gears and look at the implementation portal. Can you give me an overview of the Dynamics 365 implementation portal? What is it? What's it for? How do I use it?

Paul Mare: 23:26
Yeah, so the implementation portal became important when we said we can't do this interaction by having a person on every project that we engage with. So we started with our partners and then looking broader at projects that are what we call in the self-service space. So if a project is in the 100k to 300k revenue, we have one mode how we work with those 300k plus we give a dedicated architect right and then below the 100k the project of course is still important. They all add up but we don't have resources. We are funded by the license revenue, so we're not funded really to put people in place that will deal with the bottom part of that pyramid Right. So the first thing is that the implementation portal targets the bottom two layers of that pyramid thing. What do we want to do there? Firstly, for me to have an ability to proactively support a partner or a customer, I need to have a sense of what you are implementing. So if I don't know your project exists, I can't help. If I don't know that it's implementing customer service plus unified routing, I can't help because I have no context of what you're trying to achieve, If I don't know what phase you're in, because how we help is very phase dependent. When you in CE, if you start up a project, we should talk about your environment, design decisions. You know, are you going to have one environment, multiples, global, central? There's a whole bag that we could discuss and it's important when you, in the just before go live prepare phase, we're not having that discussion because that should have been long ago, right? So that context I need to know what phase you are in. I need to know what are you doing for whom? I need visibility. How do we create visibility? We create a portal where you can onboard your project. I can see it. You enable me to help you. That's the first thing. But if that's the only trade, you probably never on board your project on the portal because it's not all the values. What can we do more? I could ask you to profile your project. What is profile? Basically describe at a more technical level. I'm implementing these products and you tick off the products. For each of these products, I'm implementing these features. It's really important for me to know I'm going live with customer service, which includes omnichannel, unified routing and first party voice. That project sounds very difficult to different to the one that goes. I'm doing customer service, Just basic case management. We both know that's a different project. I want that insight because then I can help. Right, how do I help? First pass, which we've released a year ago and it's out there today. You can take advantage of it now. Once your project has a profile, we publish targeted reading, targeted guidance on the portal. What does targeted guidance mean? We have that 700 page flipbook. I pick the bits and pieces that are relevant to the context of your project, the phase that you're in, and I hotlink to those. When you click on the tile on the portal that pops the flipbook. It's on how to do your environment strategy, because we're in the inception phase, or later on it's on how to do performance testing, because you're preparing to go live. I take you to the relevant reading, but not only the flipbook. We have the learn site where you've got all the Microsoft documentation on Dynamics. We hotlink all those topics in. If you're implementing unified routing, we will give you an article that tells you how to configure unified routing, how to do administration of unified routing One click and you're there because that topic should be relevant to your project. If you are implementing supply chain management and we've just released new stuff on the roadmap for supply chain management. I put the new release wave documentation which you can read. That's another 700 page document. I take that and I hotlink the topic in that release note. That should interest you because your project is about supply chain management. That's what I call guided reading. I bring the targeted guidance for the project to you and then I allow you to dismiss. You go, I know that stuff already Tick these and it vanishes off my screen. You go, that thing is interesting but I'm not going to read it now. I'm going to pin it so I can come back to it later. This one I'm going to read now because I want to see what it's all about. You control your own set of reading. Everybody on the project team initially gets the same guidance, but as you start consuming the guidance, you personalize the view. If you're a functional consultant focusing on fixed assets, you focus down on product finance feature, fixed asset management, and we cut all the reading down to just that piece. Now you have what you read to make your part of the project work. That is the reason to bring your project to the portal today. I'm going to talk about tomorrow as well, but if you do that today, this is the value we give you today. It's the first step that we are taking towards bringing the success by design framework and the quality guidance to everybody.

Mark Smith: 28:44
I love this. This is already with my consultants and my teams. I'm going to be looking at making a much more strong emphasis on this. Is it also a gateway for you to identify the bigger projects coming through and where yours provides support?

Paul Mare: 29:01
Well, of course, because now we get into interesting territory. So let me step up some of the future possibilities. Once you profile a project, let me tell you something that we see more of today. We see customers buying our hundred licenses now and then they plan to roll out in a year's time to 5,000 people and that is a license saving. You know, five years ago they just bought all the licenses up front. People don't do that anymore Now. If I use money as a proxy for complexity, we want the highly complex projects to get that top level cover right. Direct architect working with you on your project. If you start with a hundred licenses, you don't make the cut off financially, so we don't support you, right, yes, and then in a year's time when you go big, guess what? All the escalations come back. Because your design was never targeting the five thousand, it wasn't validated. We're good for 100, but we're not good for five thousand. Some firefighting again, right? So in the profile of your project I literally ask you Are you with how many users are you starting your project? You go hundred licenses. I do buckets because we're not interested in the exact number but the range. Right, I go a year from now, how many users do you expect to go live? And you go a thousand. Now I know you've got a relatively steep growth curve. Now that would say, even if the money is not there, I can calculate the complexity rating. And let's say, by the way, you also implementing first party voice. It's relatively new. Not a lot of partners know how to implement that yet. Right, there are some potential hurdles to overcome, so you could probably do with an architect that helps you through that. That's done it before, right? So if I see that in your project portfolio, in profile, then I can go you profile your project to say I'm doing first party voice. I'm gonna give you an architect that knows about first party voice to walk with you on that project so I can detect and volunteer my service in future where today you need to make the money bar to get my service at the top level. Of course, here at the bottom we always gonna play. There will be guidance on the portal for you, right, but getting that direct touch of a fast track architect is a value and we work towards that as well. The profile opens up that game for us. In fact, you will no longer be able in the near future to nominate your project. The old way. You, as a partner, you nominate your project and say can I have fast track support please? Right, we're gonna change that to say, please onboard your project to the portal profile it which describes it to me. I want you to go forward that you'll get the nominate button which might get your fast track architect to help you out. And if I say no, I'm not giving you a fast track architect. After all, you've already had good guidance on that self service mode, right? Or if you have a center of excellence in your partner organization, maybe I deal with you there and you have an indirect touch to fast track, right? So I see ways in which we we can take advantage of different modes of operation and change a little bit the way we engage with the market by using what we get on the portal.

Mark Smith: 32:14
So my question is should all architects that are overseeing projects, new projects, should they all, by default, be going to this portal and getting their project profiled? The sooner the better, at the early stages?

Paul Mare: 32:32
So I'm gonna tell you one thing it's coming into the future and I think the value of that will make the answer to this question the clear yes, but let me. Let me give you the real pool. What we set up to now is all good value, right, and certainly the effort that it takes to bring a project to the portfolio will already be repaid. So I still recommend people do it today, right, but in future I'll be bringing telemetry insights to the portal. This changes the game for a partner. Let me give you an example of telemetry. During you, a team, your team, tells you I'm doing user acceptance testing, one week goes by. Do you know whether the testing has been done? Do you know whether there was test coverage? I can run on the back end telemetry against your environment and summarize the activity and go. You know, actually, only 10 records actually got touched in this week and you know that you didn't have cover or you go. You know we edited a thousand opportunities but we didn't and edit any cases. Then you know sales is at some cover but customer service hasn't right. Or in performance testing, you forecasting to to process millions of records every day and in your performance test you tested 10,000 transactions. So what does this say? Right, so we can bring those risks proactively to the project. If your projects live already, we will also expose them. Today we only take projects that are in implementation on the portal, but tomorrow we'll take the ones that have already gone live and have them there because we want to bring the telemetry to those. So you have recurring batch jobs in your finance and operations environment. They suddenly stopped running. Who picks it up? You know? Can the partner perhaps proactively reach out to the customer, say we noticed something is going wrong here. Can we come and check it out? Right? Or we detect that you're using a deprecated piece of functionality in production. Now, how about that early warning? We're going to be taking it out in three months. Partner, are you on top of it with your customer? Can you propose a small work order to go take care of that, right? Otherwise we're going to have the firefight when that hits right. Yeah, my basic strategy, by the way, is how can I enable everybody so that I avoid the firefight house? That for a selfish motivation. But if I can avoid the firefight, we are all happy.

Mark Smith: 34:54
Yeah, I love this. I love this. It's like it's got me with a whole bunch of action items coming off this recording. What else do we need to know about the implementation portal?

Paul Mare: 35:07
Well, I'm going to give you an idea of a slightly deeper dive of what you can use the portal for. We have a concept of reviews on the portal. Now reviews take the actual practice of when you start a big project and we do what we call a solution blueprint review. So we look all up all the key domains of the project. Are we good to go? Do we have everything in there and do we have risk items that we need to worry about? So it's a really good review to do at the start of a project to see do we have an angle on everything? In those very large projects when we have a direct architect involved, he's going to drive that process with the partner and customer. When we come lower down into the partner and self service space, you can imagine not everybody is going to bother to run that review because you actually have to sit down and do some work. You know it doesn't happen by itself, but the value of what comes out of the other end really takes risk out of your project. So there's an argument to be made to do these reviews and you can do them on the portal. However, I interviewed a lot of my partners on the portal and let me acknowledge what they told me. I said, paul, running a review on the portal today is like waiting through treacle. You're asking me a thousand questions when a hundred will do, and I acknowledge that we are now working to take the same profile information where you describe your project, use it to dynamically right size the review. So now I bring you the questions that are relevant to your scenario. Now we probably six months out from landing that you know. So probably we have to wait through some treacle for the time being, but that will fundamentally change the value proposition to our partners. So for much less effort, you can run a review and get these risks auto generated with the guidance on how to deal with them. And one step more, I'm going to allow partners to register projects that are not real projects. They in pre-sales. Still You're hoping to waste some business. Why not already run that review? Now you get the risks that you need to price for on your project right, and so that in itself we want to and we're working right now on the right sizing of the reviews and bringing the reviews even to pre-sales projects for partners. So we want to go as far left, you know, early engagement, pre-sales already During the lifetime of the project, and post-co-life with self-service telemetry. So we do a much wider span of good guidance to our customers and partners.

Mark Smith: 37:32
I like it, Paul. We are well over time and this, this has been just such an insightful episode. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Paul Mare: 37:42
Mark, it's been good talking. Love to touch base with you again in a couple of months time and if you want to take any of this into your own projects, you know, give me a buzz. The Dynamics 365 implementation proposal is getting to be quite cool.

Mark Smith: 37:58
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MBP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show from Microsoft, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash. Nz365 guy, how will you create on the Power Platform today? Ciao?