Nils Gooijer's Blend of Psychology and Tech: A Dive into Adoption and Change Management

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. Today's guest is from the Netherlands. He works as a product owner of business application platform. He started as a social psychologist and rolled into the IT by chance. He loves making furniture in a spare time. You can find links to his bio, social media etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, nils.

Nils Gooijer: 1:07
Thank you very much. Very nice to be here.

Mark Smith: 1:10
Did I pronounce your name right?

Nils Gooijer: 1:11
Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Mark Smith: 1:13
Yeah, awesome, I think so.

Nils Gooijer: 1:14
It's a common name in the Netherlands is Niels, so that's with an E somewhere in the middle. So I listened to both and I think in English a lot of people do Niles, which is fine by me as well.

Mark Smith: 1:24
So Very good, Very good. Tell us, you know we plan to get in and discuss, of course, adoption on the Power Platform, and this came off an event you were speaking at recently, which I saw a lot of great positive feedback on. Tell me, though, before we get started food, family and fun what do they mean to you? What do you do when you're not doing IT stuff?

Nils Gooijer: 1:49
That's quite a lot of my time actually. Family we got married to a lovely lady named Lindsay, two kids aged five and almost three. What people say about the second being a lot harder than the first is completely true, because the second one for some reason tries to find the edge a lot more than the first one does. So that's a lot of non-IT time for me. And the fun part yeah, I think the most common answer ever. The fun thing was with family, friends, movies and building furniture. I think that's the main one.

Mark Smith: 2:25
Tell me about Building Furniture.

Nils Gooijer: 2:27
Well, people usually try to connect the dots between IT and furniture and then it's blank usually on what's the link between the two. But to me it's just building stuff, and one is physical and the other is digital, and I'm not the builder type in the digital world, so I'm mainly the consultant or product owner that tries to piece things together and help people with vision and make sure that stuff gets done. But it's so much sitting behind the screen. I mean, it's just sitting the entire day behind your screen, typing, emailing, doing teams calls and then having something physical to counteract that. Just bang on a piece of wood for a couple of hours on Saturday. That's, for some reason, just really works, and both are. With the tools that you have at your disposal, Just try to make the best of it, which to me has quite a lot of links with SharePoint, Teams, Power, Platform, all of this stuff in between just trying to make the best of what you have and just trying to build.

Mark Smith: 3:33
Yeah, how did you get into IT? Because, as I said in the intro, social psychologist is a bit of a journey.

Nils Gooijer: 3:42
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, as most people that don't know what to study, I think they go for either law, something in business or psychology. So I was the third one. Very great background, but the study is very broad so you never know what to do with it, unless you stay at university and teach or just any else. I have any research rolled into a nonprofit organization, started doing it within that organization and then thought, well, it always was a hobby and something appealing to me. Plus, it has a lot better career opportunities than the nonprofit sector. I had a lot of fun there, but in it there's just more you can do, more resources. Sky's the limit usually. So I started doing more it in that nonprofit organization and then thought, well, if I want to do this, I need to up my resume. So I did that for a year, did the CRM upgrade, I did a share point implementation. This was about seven years ago, so share put online was just around the corner. And then, for some reason, a dude that I only knew by that family member with a strange name, which is Amancio quant. You'll probably listen to this somewhere when it's launched, but I talked to him. I never talked to him, but it appeared to be, for some reason, one of the most fun people in my family. He worked it still does at a Microsoft partner named McCaw. I knew Avanade, where I think a lot of people know at least that organization from, as a partner for the nonprofit organization I worked for. So I talked at both, with my slightly upgraded resume of CRM and SharePoint, and then McCaw came with a good offer and said Well, you have less SharePoint skills than CRM, but looking at your profile social psychology I think that fits better with what you want to do, what you can do, where we see the field evolving into. So I picked that one. Well that's been six years now.

Mark Smith: 5:39
Wow, okay, so a good week, while what's your main day to day? If I was to come and sit in your office, what would your day to day look like? Week to week look like.

Nils Gooijer: 5:50
Yeah, so that's it's that I work for our bigger customers. So we as a company do quite a lot except CRM, as a CRM is not a dynamic, is not one of the folks is, but for the rest we do pretty much everything and I'm the I try to piece things together for the customers we work so for. So I work a lot for Heineken, for example, which is one of our bigger customers. I work for them for four days a week and that's mainly trying to try to do pragmatic things on adoption, change management, pre sales analysis for apps or solutions. We need to build a bit of project management, but only if we don't have project management on a specific project. So it's mainly piece together all of the loose things that that surround a project or things we do to customer, just connect the dots, basically.

Mark Smith: 6:39
Is it thirsty work working for Heineken?

Nils Gooijer: 6:41
Yeah, when you start working that. So I've been working for Macau for the past six years and Heineken, I think, for the past five or five and a half, and different capacity, but now in the power platform team. And when you're in the office which of course was more before Corona than now but when you're in the office you see people opening up a can of beer in the middle of the day. That's really strange. Until you see that it's 0.0 and it's OK. Ok, that's normal to do within a company, but it's still very straight to see people drink beer at the office.

Mark Smith: 7:07
Yeah, Well, well, tell me about your view on how you create organizational adoption of the power platform.

Nils Gooijer: 7:18
Yeah, that's that. I think that's a very hard question. I think there, well, microsoft's been doing and I've heard the same in your conversation with Simon Owen a couple weeks ago I met him and talked to him briefly in Dublin but there's the e-talk about the center of enablement that start, of course, with the center of excellence and more folks on adoption and change management by Microsoft. I think that's a very good path into better adoption or also looking at the people's side of things, the change part other than the KPIs, and we need to implement things to improve the bottom line of the business. So the easiest answer to view on proper adoption and change management just follow that center of enablement route, all of all of the things that people talk about. But the biggest thing to me that people forget is to make it fun. So what I've been seeing customers for the past couple of years and what I also talked about in in doubling on the power platform conference, the one you refer to, is we talk a lot about adoption and change management and a lot of methodologies and theories and how to set up a team and somebody needs to be responsible. All of the unique have champions. You need to have a community, all of the, I think, things a lot of people know about now. How to get that done is really hard to find that actual owner, somebody who's not in it, making sure there's budget, and then there's all licensing discussion. So that's the topic that have been discussed A lot in a lot of different. Also, when I see you post on linkedin, for example, everything you think post on how to get things adopted are true. Those lists are really good and very important to follow. But the thing to me that people forget and I can what I talked about in the blend Is it also has to be something, has to be a movement that people want to be a part of. It has to be something that people want to join me. That's. That's what marketing does and there's a lot of social psychology behind marketing. So what's the price? That? That is something I can't come to my mind. But we as, I guess, human beings with a tendency to just create a process, follow it and then never question why we actually created that process and then the next guy or girl comes in as well. I know the predecessor made the process and I were just following that process and I see the same thing happening and change and adoption. So we say it's people first, human centric, but then we get lost in kpi's and targets and road map and processes and automated emails and we try to automate the welcome message and the message is fun, but then Actually just talk to a person and See what they're doing with. The value is behind the app resolution that they've created to Q and a sessions where you just crack jokes for the first ten minutes and make it feel like like a group of friends being together. That is what we often forget. So short answer to a question just follow the extensive documentation and change and adoption do it, practice it, get better at it and find an owner. And to me, the thing that most people forget is make it fun, make it something people want to be a part of. Otherwise it all, it all, probably fail.

Mark Smith: 11:25
So now comes the hell question yeah, so this is. This is a bunch of things I'm gonna unpack and what you've said there. One is just so in your mind you can think about how this is gonna come together. One is how do you make it fun to you talk a lot about changing adoption, but to a lot of people those are just two words that they know nothing about systems, processes etc behind it. So I'd like it unpacked. Unpacked kind of, if we're, if we're looking at this show here, this episode as a educational, where would we go direct people to to skill up in change and adoption? You talked about an interesting thing there in marketing around how do you and I've lost you had a brilliant word for it but it's like how do you create the, the community, the grounds? Well, within an organization that people want to put their hand up and say, hey, that's me, I want to be part of that group that you know I did, I identify with that, you know, inside the organization. So these are all you know. We've talked about enablement. Enablement, I feel, is People understand how to turn technology on. People understand how to follow a bouncing ball, change the setting, do that deploy. This makes sense the minute you go to hey, how do we enable an organization, how do we create a community in there, that that are really we're looking at the whole soft skills side of things all the the how do you create a functional team that can scale to thousands of people, depending on the size of the organization you're in? And and you use another thing that that team doesn't necessarily sit in it. So and I use the term, I feel it's, it's adjacent to it. I don't think it's an it function to actually Run the power platform inside an organization. I think, yes, there's, there's licensing, there's deployment of the tenant, you know the main. But everything then, from environment up, you know, yes, things like the L P governance. This team that makes up the power platform community should work adjacent with key stakeholders in IT. But I find that anytime IT runs at the show, there's no innovation. That's my perception. So tell me I'm giving you a lot to work with. What are your thoughts at? Pop to mine.

Nils Gooijer: 13:49
Well, the first thought was that if he asks on the podcast, how do you do this, then I need to come up with a good answer, and I still don't have a very good answer. So that was the first thing that popped into my mind. So a couple things. So the reason why I went to the power platform conference in Dublin was Rebecca Albert. She's an MVP, you probably know her. She's the one with the thing for unicorns, I think that's that's what people know. She kept nagging me and nagging is a negative word, but she kept bugging me on. Okay, but Just do encouraging and thank you, that's a little better. Rebekah, really listening, I'm sorry, listen to mark. She asked me did, why don't you Do that? Do a session at one of these conferences. And that's how I got got dragged in and. But then I had to think about okay, but what do we talk about? So we have to make the title click baity after have a good flight, after have a good story. So that's why I picked a bit of first bit of introduction what is adoption, what is change management and what, to me, is that missing link? And I sort of gave it away, but that fun, more marketing related thing, because there's so much talk about adoption and change management, as you also mentioned. But which is what I mean. When do you use adoption is the same as change management. So I start with that and to me but I think that's also personal answer adoption is the thing that a lot of people doing it project or some related to it projects or Business take over for it. They know the word adoption and they know it means something on not throwing something over the fence, but actually making sure People use it, or that it's something that people want to use or actually ask somebody okay, what do you want? To me, adoption is the Very practical part. So the part where you create a training, where you do a workshop, where you I don't have floor walkers the moment you launch something which still sounds like something out of the walking dead, but I think a lot of people know what floor walkers are actually. So I do this access in that session where from left to right, it's micro to micro. Smaller projects are very big project Add top to bottom was theoretical and the bottom was practical and to me, adoption sits in that lower left quadrant. So for smaller projects, like a solution that you create an application, you create something you want to implement what is quite practical, which perfectly fine. If you then want to do a platform implementation, to me that that goes towards that top right corner, which is more theoretical more processes, more excel sheets to fill out, more and more Assessments to do. I mean, if somebody ever saw something from pro side of car, which is the lot of the methodology behind the thing, that the things we use in the Microsoft world also us and myself that's more towards the macro, theoretical. So doing stakeholder analysis, seeing if they're For or against or neutral towards the project you're attracted to. Are they good sponsors or or Very verbally strong, present people like stakeholders you need to do something with, or is there a difference between the people you want to get on board, yes or no? Who are the target audiences of the thing you're trying to implement? Usually the platform itself. So those two things although a lot of people mix the terms to me, to me they mean smaller things, more practical things For which you do quick reference card training, a share point side, all of the things that that are not that hard to do but very easy to miss and, if you're going to be a thing that needs a theoretical basis of what we try to achieve when. What are the milestones at the KPIs, etc. So that was, I believe, an answer to one of the things you you mentioned on, which is when do you use what? At least to me, yes, if it's a smaller, you're not gonna do full change management for an application For maybe a big dynamics upgrade or a very big project or power platform, and yes, then you mix the two. But the thing that I missed in between those so in between bigger projects and very theoretical and simpler, more practical, but for smaller things was that marketing angle. Because in, in adoption you have Q and a sessions, you do trainings, you do Very simple things in change management. For people know you talk about what's your key message, and your key message, like your product launch, whom are you gonna send it to? The witch taker you're gonna send it, and then also which sponsor is going to send that key message to which Key audience. So, yes, I think process loves at the word key, I think we all do for some reason. Now that I say the word out loud, I think a zillion times, but that doesn't really talk about coherence. So it doesn't talk about okay, but you're going to bombard people with messages. You're going to think about what you want to send them, you're going to think about who sends it, but you're not gonna think about the marketing part, not about the slogan of the branding, not about the more practical stuff that you have an adoption. So luckily there's a field that's been tried and tested for the past I know 30 or 40 years which is marketing, which thinks about content calendars on what's your main content, who do you send it to? Also very similar things in between those two. So Very long story short, but now that you know me a bit, that is the story of my life. It's always longer than I think it's got to be. Then the topic for that session in Dublin on the power platform. So that Rebecca encouraged me to do. I thought well, this is a good topic. This explains things about adoption, explains things about change management, puts them into perspective. And then the missing link in between. So the thing to me that ties it together, which isn't a true light bulb moment, but it is. To me it was okay. But wait, I'm looking for something like a content calendar. Oh wait, marketing has been doing this for dozens of years. I have a marketing calling. I can ask oh, they have a template, awesome, I'll fill that out and start using that in the power platform implementation within Heineken, for example. So it provides a different angle. It adds new things, new templates, new, new knowledge we can use and the best part is, to me, it's been there for dozens of years, so it's not something new, it's not something you have to figure out, it's not something you have to create yourself. It's just stuff you can use. But I don't think it's. It's stuff we've been searching within the adoption, change management worlds of, especially IT Implementations. So that was also a part of an answer, and then I forgot the rest of the questions.

Mark Smith: 20:13
It's good. It's good, I like, because you mentioned prosci, which is it's, it's where. When I think of the word adoption and change management, that's where I think, and people like, oh yeah, but there's other systems. I've never seen somebody present me another system or solution or said this is better than prosci. So prosci is definitely. That makes sense, and if you're listening, go take a look, look up on prosci the ad car model, look at how when I know it was 2013, when I first came across this, this way of creating or facilitating successful software projects and it was a lightened day in how it changed you talked about big projects over time, it was really the marker of success of those projects, because there's nothing worse than going live, deploying and then assessment for a month later, nobody's using it, nobody. Oh why isn't anybody adopting it, and I found that when you implemented and had someone in the role of change manager on projects, they seem to go really well, consistently well. Now, another thing you just said there, though, was about fun, and I just think fun is such a subjective thing, and for some people, facilitating fun doesn't come naturally right. There is the need to go to a local coffee shop, perhaps to create the fun, and I am meaning in the Amsterdam term of coffee shop or you need to. You know, it doesn't come naturally. And so when you think about you know, like when I feel, when I kick off a meeting, I've really thought about it. So I'm going to run a workshop and I start with, let's say, an exercise 30 minutes long, maybe about getting to know you, and I get people to do practical. Like you know, I think of that icebreaker and I try to mix it up and make it different. But the whole idea is get people out of overthinking why they're here, overthinking why you know what they need to say, how they need to look, and really get them to the point of comfortableness of just presenting themselves and perhaps parts themselves that they didn't think were applicable. But it gives other people context and understanding how we work as a team. So, going back to that fun thing, if you were looking across, you know, let's say, you're embedded in assisting an organization like Heineken. How do you create that culture inside the and it's not just this app build, but it's in the context of the platform. So it's in the context of a thousand apps, 10,000 apps, 50,000 automations how do you create that element of fun? And, you know, inclusivity, bringing people into the mix all the time.

Nils Gooijer: 22:52
Yeah, when I just said I forgot the other question, I tried to dodge the how one, but you expertly brought it back, so that was great. So I think a lot of it rests on the team driving this. So if you look at our Heineken team I'm not an expert on high-performance teams I'm not trying to say that we are, by the way, that would be very egotistical but it's if the team driving an implementation or even just an app and the implementation of that app is purely focused on the processes and the business outcomes and all the important things that I'm by no means trying to make less important than it is, then you're going to get workshops and meetings focused on very blue, as in disc MBTI profiles if that rings a bell very process or organization focused people running that workshop in a team that doesn't have a lot of fun and isn't the team itself, isn't inclusive and there's no psychological safety. So I don't know, people can, just they can't say what they want to, and then that is what you're going to get how to create that team. That is it. If we crack that one, it's going to be, I think, a million dollar company that we can set up and then just do that for now and create those teams, but it's for some reason within our Heineken team it worked and I see that and I'm not trying to make, I'm not trying to advertise about our company, but within Mokha it also works. And the good news to me is that and I'll try to answer as much of the how as I can within a lot of the Microsoft ecosystem and especially within the Power Platform, it also sort of happened. So I don't know why it happened. I don't know why it doesn't happen for out systems, or at least I don't see it happening. I'm not that well first in that world, but I don't see the same within the out system world or the Mendex world or SAP or I don't know. Name your competitors on whatever field that Microsoft is in, which is every field. I don't see the same level of fun. And to me that also ties back into and I'll try to work this into an answer that also ties into that builder mentality that I've mentioned in my bios or what I like and what I like to do. A lot of us, and I think most people, have that innate intrinsic motivation to build stuff, to create things, and then we start working and we get blocked out by all of the processes and cockwheels and all of that stuff and we just follow processes and that's also fine. I mean, you have to provide for your family, you have to do what you do Again, not saying that that's not good or important, but that natural feeling to build things. That's for better or worse, because it leads to a lot of things being created that don't have to be created, but for better or worse. That is very hard to ignore If you look at it from that angle. The Microsoft community, especially around the Power Platform, is filled with people who are wanting to build stuff and from that intrinsic motivation, from that sort of necessity to get something out of your hands into it, that will it into existence, that in and of itself is fun. Not the entire process, because stuff fails, people get angry. Not everything is fun, but overall that process is fun. So if you have that baseline, to me it doesn't have to be that hard to make such a community and a Power Platform implementation. It should. I don't think it that hard to make it fun because to me, by definition, people wanting to build things, creating things, get enthusiastic about what I feel. People want to share that. So if you enable them and don't lock too many settings and lock down permissions and hopefully get your licensing model in order so people can actually build the more fun stuff than just job point and Data, first team stuff, that I think you just not trying to be too philosophical, but the same as a river and just bend it in the right direction and not stand and it's way too much. And I think that the company that I see words not that fun, not that much fun is that it's there's a team behind it, very focused on business outcome, very focused on processes, very focused on sort of the old it had a job, permissions and security and making sure that that stuff isn't redundant. And you think about support ability and maintain ability over important things. But if you focus on that too much, then, same as with a kid coming to you with something of Lego that they just build, like my kids the only thing you have to do to encourage them to build the next thing. Just be positive, acknowledge what they build and then try to make it better together or something it to me, and I think that's the best answer I can give try to stay close to more natural things like building things, encouraging things. Be positive about what other people build and try to build on top of it seems improv comedy. Not just say yes and all the time not say no, or nobody have to talk to peter. What is? It looks good, but Bob just created the same thing. So I don't know what you guys are doing, but I'm not using. Until you figure out what I'm gonna use, I'm not using it. I don't care. So I think just let nature run its course, which is a very strange thing to say about it. But just yeah, stay close to the builder mentality and harness that innovation power and that fun that people have while building things and not being too much of a roadblock to them.

Mark Smith: 27:51
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application mvp mark smith, otherwise known as the nz 365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on linkedin. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out. Buy me a coffee. Dot com. Ford slash nz 365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.