Navigating the Tech Terrain: AJ Zafar's Thrilling Journey from Web Developer to Power Platform Wizard at Metro Bank

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 England. In the United Kingdom, he works at Kevdurt Curve Digital as a solutions architect. He started in August 2023, so he's a fresher there. He has mainly been involved in Microsoft Technologies, azure, power Platform, sharepoint, dynamics. He's passionate about staying up to date with the latest tech trends, as well as the volume of bear one can consume in a day. He loves sharing with the community. You can find links to his bio. Social media. Show notes are where you'll find all those things. Welcome to the show, aj.

AJ Zafar: 1:21
Hello Mark, thank you for having me. That was a perfect intro. I really appreciate that.

Mark Smith: 1:27
Especially being that this started before you actually joined, as in, we started our conversation before you joined. Kevdurt right.

AJ Zafar: 1:33
No, exactly, I feel terrible. I think it was a mixture of the whole transition out from the wonderful Metro Bank and Transition to Kevdurt. That got me a little bit caught up and busy, so do apologize about that. I'm really happy to be on this. I should be very excited to be on this Because I've lived a few of the episodes.

Mark Smith: 1:50
It's good to have you on and, of course, I met you two weeks ago in person in Vegas for the first time. You have a reputation in the community of being an absolute fucking rock star and doing some amazing things in the history. You know what I saw you were doing and heard that you're doing a Metro Bank, which really initiated me reaching out and understanding a bit about how you take makers on a journey and what you think around tooling and setting up and how you, you know, think about scaling the power platform and organizations. But before we go there, food, family, fun I know you have no problem in the fun department Tell me about food, family and then tell me about the fun things that you do that doesn't involve the power platform.

AJ Zafar: 2:37
Food, ok, food, family and fun. Well, food, food. I love food. I love all types of food. Food is fantastic and it's a great way to teach. What's my favorite food is probably the question here, so I'm probably going to go quite simple with this. It's probably going to disappoint the audience, but I'm going to go with the pizza. More importantly, pineapple on pizza, something nice, something me for a Hawaiian, maybe a spicy meat with some pineapple chucked on top. I would like to agree with those that say it does not belong there. I don't care, yeah.

Mark Smith: 3:06
I agree.

AJ Zafar: 3:07
It's a pizza.

Mark Smith: 3:08
No, it's, it's. I 100 percent agree with you. Oh, I'm in the, I'm in the pineapple on pizza camp.

AJ Zafar: 3:13
There you go. That's it, so I'm a big fan of that. So it is a. It is a simple choice, but it is a lovely choice and you can never go wrong with it, wherever you are in the world. Someone does a good pizza there. Yeah, that's true, that's the food family. But I'd say I'm going to go with the whole. I'm going to go with the one that everyone's probably going to hate me for. You know, the community was a big family for me. But as well as that, I'd say I have to shout out Nella, my partner in crime. She is awesome. She's my girlfriend. It's got six years now, so she's been well thinking by me. But in terms of anyone else, I don't have any mini monsters I know some of the community have and I don't have anyone else that's that is having to put up with me just yet. So nice, who knows, maybe one day Tell us about fun. Tell you about fun. Well, I'm a simple guy, I'm sensible, I don't do anything too crazy, as anyone who's come to a community event with me will know or maybe disagree with. But yeah, I must say I do a lot of things for fun. My big belief, my philosophy, which is quite a simple one, is just do it. Just do some fun stuff when you like. For example, in Vegas, there was loads of good opportunities for fun and I think I said yes to every single one.

Mark Smith: 4:28
Any. What was the highlight of Vegas for you.

AJ Zafar: 4:31
I'm going to be honest. I know, I know shooting is a bit controversial, but I think the highlight for for me was going to the shooting range with my good friend Chris and Kiki and having a blast shooting those mini guns and 50 caliber dude. They were machines.

Mark Smith: 4:48
You did a 50, you did a 50 cal.

AJ Zafar: 4:49
Yeah, I did a 50 cal sniper rifle. I can't remember exactly what it was. It was amazing, it was intense, it was. I've done it.

Mark Smith: 4:56
I've done it, I know it. Yeah, man, I've done the 50 cal snipe. Yeah.

AJ Zafar: 5:00
But I have a video clip that I need to show you, mark. Honestly, it's just Kiki videoing me, and then none of us expected how loud it was going to be. It goes up and she's just running off in the middle of the video, tidally. But the bit that shocks me the most of everything was after she had the chance to see me through it. And then Chris did it. She's used to the noise of it, so she gets behind it as if nothing. She says it's her first time shooting it. And she headshots, the target and that taught me not to mess with Kiki. She was scoring shots and sent to mass.

Mark Smith: 5:35
Yeah, any time a South African female says she doesn't know how to use a gun, she's lying Hard out. Man, she is 100% lying. I've got a. My nephew married a South African. She shot a guy. She has been carjacked and therefore knew that she was going to die in the carjacking if she didn't get out of it. So she just picked a car across the road and just floored head on into another car and woke up in hospital. Man, south African chicks know how to handle themselves right.

AJ Zafar: 6:08
I will completely agree with you there. Honestly it blew me away and honestly, chris was doing some madness as well with his guns. I must say I think he did much better at the centre mastering and the minigun. He did better at the minigun than me With the minigun. I did drift a bit too far left with it, but I wouldn't say I did too bad. But I think what I found easy with the guns, with the beautiful sights that all lined up for me, so it was pretty much point and shoot.

Mark Smith: 6:33
But as in so I did it in Atlanta at an MVP thing some years ago, many years ago, and it was $12 every time you pulled the trigger on the 50 cal right, Because the cartridge is, they're pretty sizable. What was the cost there per cartridge?

AJ Zafar: 6:49
I don't know what the cost of the cartridge was, but I know how much it spent on the whole package.

Mark Smith: 6:53
Oh yeah, what was the package?

AJ Zafar: 6:55
It was about 1.5 K. Wow, that's fun, right?

Mark Smith: 7:00
Thank you for saying that Did they line up the guns? Did they give you the magnum?

AJ Zafar: 7:07
They lined everything up. We had the coolest instructor. It was amazing. He lined everything up, taught us everything, stayed with us throughout the whole thing. He said here's your minigun. It's got a hundred rounds in a minigun. We had two of those. I shot one of the miniguns, chris shot one of the miniguns. And then we had light machine guns. We had AKs. M16 was one of them. We had a range of guns. It was the full package. I went for two rounds of one of the packages plus an extra few guns. Nice, I said you know what, the way I justified it, which Aaron, rendo and Kuki and a few of the others in the crew didn't seem to agree with my maths there. But Christine, thankfully she did, she backed me there. So I do appreciate you going with that as an experience. You're right, it's an experience. I just thought about saying the cost of flying back over to do this later on in life.

Mark Smith: 7:57
Add that.

AJ Zafar: 7:58
That's good logic.

Mark Smith: 7:59
That's good logic, right, that's the logic Cup idea I'm seize the day Take the opportunity when you have them.

AJ Zafar: 8:05

So, yeah, I had the opportunity and I took it, so that was, I'd say that was a highlight. And, plus, the same day we come back and the gang did a little birthday surprise for me, which was absolutely lovely. Nice, it was quite a nice little celebration, I think, and Kuki and everyone sorted out a cake. We had a card. It was lovely.

Mark Smith: 8:27
So I was there with a brilliant way to celebrate what a question Did they let you choose?

AJ Zafar: 8:32
your target. They did. But we did go for the simple ones because some of the other ones were a bit controversial.

Mark Smith: 8:38
I know, right, that's what I was. That's what I'm alluding to, right, the options they give you for targets are like are you serious? Yeah, they have. You know, no wonder the culture in America is like it is right.

AJ Zafar: 8:53
Honestly, it's insane.

Mark Smith: 8:54
I think it's get your mother-in-law picture up there, or let's get your ex up there, or I'm like, oh my gosh.

AJ Zafar: 9:01
Honestly, the most tame one was not tame enough. I actually have pictures of some of the targets because of how bad they were.

Mark Smith: 9:08
I know we weren't using them, but yeah we weren't for the simple ones.

AJ Zafar: 9:13
I actually have the Just no I took home.

Mark Smith: 9:15
You just went for the silhouettes.

AJ Zafar: 9:17
Yes, the silhouettes yeah. Took them on with me as well after shooting them.

Mark Smith: 9:20
Nice, nice. I tried to bring my gun cartridges home, but the airport security took them off me. I have them.

AJ Zafar: 9:27
I got. You got them through, wow. So I was told by the wonderful guys at the range if you put them in your check luggage, mix them in with everything, you should be fine, because they're not technically, they're not live, they're not anything brand new.

Mark Smith: 9:39
No, they're spin, they're well-spin, right yeah.

AJ Zafar: 10:31

So I've got my 50 cal that I fired, and I've got two of the ones as well. So it's not. It's not bad, I've got them already there. They also were selling souvenirs. They had a tank made out of gun casings, so I was like you know, I'm going to take that as well, so I've got one of those as well.

Mark Smith: 10:47
Yeah, nice, nice, nice.

AJ Zafar: 10:48
Chris said the matting board.

Mark Smith: 10:50
Oh, good times, man. It's good you had fun, oh I love it. Let's talk about how you got into your Microsoft journey. What was it for you?

AJ Zafar: 11:00
It's okay. So Microsoft journey was a bit fun. I'd say it makes you fun and frustration, so let's go with that. In the past I used to do a lot of web development and a lot of, you know, front-end web stuff, not as a I don't know, but I used to do it for a little bit of side hustle, but freelance work. And during this time I was also, you know, studying and I was looking for a job. So I was working at the wonderful Metro Bank. So that was part of it. And how did you?

Mark Smith: 11:30
get your job at Metro to start with. Was it because of tech and IT? No, it wasn't. Or did you start as a bank teller?

AJ Zafar: 11:37
I started as a customer service representative in one of their bankers. Yeah, Wicked.

Mark Smith: 11:42
That's so cool.

AJ Zafar: 11:43
So what I did was I was doing tech prior to this. For many years I did loads of fun little games I worked on. I used to use Unity a fair bit to try and make it big as a game. It never worked out but I always thought I was going to make the next big game. But I ended up progressing into the Web Dev stuff and then at the same time I was introduced to, you know, power Platform. Because I was asked by somebody could one of the websites write to something at the time that was called Common Data Service? So I was like what's that CDS? Yeah, cds. I was like I don't know the CDS. They're like it's basically SQL. Can you write to it? I worked, yeah, I could write to it. So they had a very basic site. It was a WordPress site, it was quite simple. So I was able to integrate that into Dataverse and at that time I started exploring Power Platform. And at the same time I had a wonderful colleague at Metro Bank showing me some cool stuff with Power Raps. So it was all coming together from both angles at the same time. I think it was my good friend, oliver Teleski at the time he was working in their dynamics team. So I was like because he knew I'd do some stuff, so I started building some jazzy bits over there and I think my entire time spent as a customer service representative was focused on building primarily building these apps and adding some value there. So it got really good and I was doing it for some time before he messaged his friend Paul and then they brought me on to take a look at the Power Raps team and we created it at Metro Bank. So it was a blast. They originally geared it towards solving the smaller problems, even though we both know that Power Platform can solve some really big enterprise level problems. But it was focusing on those things and then seeing how many of those things we could solve in a quick way and growing it out from there.

Mark Smith: 13:25
I like it. What was the big thing that you did there around creating environment for makers, creating an enablement around makers and fusion teams? And, yeah, what did you do?

AJ Zafar: 13:43
Okay, Well, I think I did do a fair bit and I was actually really proud of what we achieved there and I did receive a lot of support from people feeling in with it. But essentially what we did there was at the time it was quite early on there was no citizen development, no enablement. Power Platform was blocked for the masses. It was entirely restricted to only the Dynamics dev team. Nobody else is allowed to use it. They did give me some good reasons for this. They had examples of cases where, you know, because they hadn't focused on, you know, the governance and the security elements I'm not sure if I could say that part on the podcast but because they didn't focus on the key areas of the platform that they needed to create those, you know, guardrails, they didn't feel comfortable bringing it out, especially in the past when some people had built some automations in the default environment that had some not so fun, you know, reactions. So I came out.

Mark Smith: 14:43
Very typical right, Very typical of what we see in the market.

AJ Zafar: 14:46
No, exactly. And obviously them being you know them being a bank, heavily regulated, they had deep concerns. They were like Power Platform is awesome, we accept that, but we're comfortable giving it to you devs, you guys can make some value with it. But sharing it wide just wouldn't work. So I just started working out, you know, working with the InfoSec guys and speaking with them, and I started saying, hey, what is it that we need to make you comfortable with people working on it? Yeah, great question. At that time they did give me a good answer. They gave me a great answer actually. They said there's key issues, one being the knowledge, two being the monitoring and shadow you know shadow IT concerns that a lot of organized agents have dr. Those are the first two concerns they had, and then they were always worried about data loss and other issues and also roots, alive and aleph. So they gave me loads of great concerns. So I started saying so if I start solving these concerns for you, yes, can we get it? And they were very fair. They said to me, if we have a model that solves these concerns and meets this stuff 100%. So, while this wasn't the full fledged enablement that I know and love, you know where everyone in the you know everyone's empowered everyone can build personal productivity environment In the default environment that everyone called personal productivity. It was something. So I started taking some things off there and started letting it grow. So the first things, I started focusing on my own knowledge. So I worked with a wonderful person, could hear and what's he was really interested in the fact he was breaking it you're breaking through the little rules and building himself without realizing it. So he was like the first person I wanted to bring on. So I had a chat with him, so I was killing him and I started learning what the best way to do this was. So we came with a range of things we had. We had one on one sessions directly. We had. You know, eventually, when we got into wider groups, we had group sessions, for more people want to call and we start with this group sessions?

Mark Smith: 16:53
did you make them a regular current?

AJ Zafar: 16:54
so we had different ones that were regular to the power of your ones, of the power of your lunch and lunch and lunch and lunch, and lunch are a great concept and everyone's like no one wants to learn during lunch. But, frankly, what do people do, you know, they don't mind getting a little bit of a meal out there and he doesn't have to be during lunch time, it's just. Yeah, when I was a concept, it's a concept and that was the main thing. And we also had these dropping sessions, I think here and since me, you know, since taking over, that is really perfect to drop in sessions even more. So it was just we said you're meeting and we have a cool and one of us will. He's now the citizen developer coach there. But at the time myself I'd be on the cool, I'd be doing my work, I was being productive, I was working on the stuff I needed to any apps I was developing or checking any stuff in the environment. Someone would hop on and would say, hey, I've got this. Can we take a look at it? That's all stuff.

Mark Smith: 17:46
So it was so this is like an open teams channel that you would have all come as welcome in the business and you know I think sometimes people call this offers hours. You, this time, you're available online to take whatever you want to bring in through my way and have a chat about.

AJ Zafar: 18:05
Very close to that. It was exactly pretty much that, except with with the teams over in first, one of the concerns they raise, obviously the terms of accountability, make sure the right people building. So at the time the way we scaled it out was quite slow and steady. The way we did it was we reached out to business leaders and we told them we want to meet your people, you want some of your people time, twenty percent of their time a week, the training building. So the of those business areas. They gave us a few people really interested in and we focus on those people. Often they gave you twenty percent of time, twenty percent. I was really amazing.

Mark Smith: 18:39
That's pretty amazing.

AJ Zafar: 18:40
I think, with Kieran as the huge success story and showing so much value and promise, it was almost a no brainer. People wanted the slots. In fact, they wanted more time than we can do in this really structured and rigid way. It was really growing such a nice in such a nice place. Especially the operations team. They took the song in stride. They gave us people that had enjoyed using excel and macros. Some people would be doing some crazy stuff for share point lists. These people have been putting in a lot of work in top skill in themselves in other areas. Some of them have been learning how platform on their own time. I think one of them I mean a friend who worked at an insurance company told them about power platform and they wanted to learn it next x, y and z, but then when they found out they can do it inside the bank, yeah, it's a win, win. So yeah, yeah, yeah this solving of the knowledge issue is really important for the it guys. And then, from this is when I started obviously you know, at the same time as this, building up the environment strategy for the citizen developers, because I'm in for sec didn't want people to have access to everything at the same time, which is understand course. Yeah, yeah, yeah but then I was thinking so what was it?

Mark Smith: 19:48
what? Just just thinking about your environment strategy, and just to Take a step back, that we're not gonna talk about your employer there, but in your general thinking now. So you know, play what you've learned. If you're going to do that citizen dev environment today, how would you think about it? What would you put in place From an environment strategy? And I'm only talking for those, you know, those citizen devs, the newcomers to the plat, not your, you know your produce that are trained, been doing it, you know, done it multiple times, not the first rodeo okay then.

AJ Zafar: 20:29
Um, it's good question. It does depend on a few factors, I think, based on what we know, what we know today and what we have today. What I would do is I have a range of manage the environments, what the manager environments can often stem a lot of concerns people have with the system development, like monitoring how many times and, I'm sure, to make sure dev isn't turning into the fraud without people realizing it. As well as that, using a high points through, what I would do is I'd have a learning environment to someone to just talk about it, which has a much stricter dlp. I'd have a separate environment for the citizen development dev environment and I'd make it quite clear the differences between these. And obviously, from the dev environment, we look at using the manager environments for your pipelines, for your tests and fraud. I do it in this. Obviously, we teach them all about application life cycle management. You know, from the creation of the app to the end of time when it disappears, when you need to terminate it or bring it down, how that runs in a life cycle. Also giving them the playground work from. Obviously, with this they need those premium features, but I think these days what I found is a lot more companies are comfortable giving out those premium features, not the end of the value, some still on for those that are not the difference strategy. But for these ones it would be something more like this how does? that sound.

Mark Smith: 21:53
Yeah, that's good In what you were doing with the developing that season team. My understanding I hear not from yourself but others that did you create some type of app that allowed that you used to facilitate this kind of you know how you took somebody from zero to doing something.

AJ Zafar: 22:16
Yes, I think I know what you're referring to. So yeah, it has been grown.

Mark Smith: 22:19
I don't know what I'm referring to. Tell me what was it called.

AJ Zafar: 22:22
I didn't have a good name for it at the time. It's since been given a better name by my colleague, kieran. I believe it's now called the the development management application. He's also got a theory test app that complements it now, which I love.

Mark Smith: 22:35
What's a? Okay, tell me about the theory test app.

AJ Zafar: 22:38
The theory test app is awesome. It's something cool that he's worked on. We worked on it together at the start but he's perfected it since we're leaving, but essentially what it does is in the UK when you the way we got the idea from was when you do a driving test or you can take the actual practical, you've got to do a theory test, which is you know you're going to be buying 100% same in New Zealand. Yeah, yeah, exactly that so what we thought of was in the past we were using exams and skills and certifications to help benchmark people as well as you know us seeing what they do and what they build. But obviously, with the changes in the exams and the ESI for the employment I think it was enterprise skills initiative dropping to 50%, it was quite. It wasn't really easy for us to incentivize people to take, you know, the Microsoft exams until they felt more comfortable. So sorry.

Mark Smith: 23:25
Let me just clarify that because I think that's a UK specific scenario. Talking about, what was that? Skills initiative? What is that?

AJ Zafar: 23:33
Yeah, it was a fantastic skin initiative with Microsoft where, you know, with a lot of enterprises, they could get their certifications 100% off.

Mark Smith: 23:41
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, and they killed it about 12 months ago.

AJ Zafar: 23:43
Exactly, they slashed it to 50%, which people are doing, and it's very helpful, but it dramatically, you know, impacted how we were, the model we were using, because the model we were using, you do these apps, you gain these skills then you go for PL 900, you do these apps, you do the test ones and then you go for PL 100. Correct, correct. We took the whole process and it's how we had several people that were citizen developers with 900, with 100 and 200. It's fantastic, it was phenomenal, I was loving it. I was really impressed with how they were. They were certified, because these are certifications development go for and these are citizen developers with them.

Mark Smith: 24:19
Totally, totally. You know, as in personally I've found I can take somebody from nothing. Never heard of the Power Platform and in 90 days have them at PL 600 completed, including for PL 400 and PL 500 as well. So the automation it's all the way through.

AJ Zafar: 24:39
It's a muscle.

Mark Smith: 24:40
Right.

AJ Zafar: 24:41
It's a muscle.

Mark Smith: 24:42
You know, when I started my career there was a thing called an MCSE, microsoft Certified System Engineer. It was about six exams, nine if you did the IIS, which is Internet Information Server back in the day all kind of irrelevant now in the cloud world and we used to run these cram sessions that took builders, tradies and stuff and convert them into ID and start their IT careers. But of course you can do it the slow way and do it those type of exams over a couple of years, or you can go you know what I'm going to get my exam muscle working and nail it and then build the experience behind it. So I'm pleased that you had that model then around developing people like that.

AJ Zafar: 25:26
That was it, because I was thinking it was a win for them and it was a win for us, because once they had the certifications, we could prove they'd got these skills. They're certified by Microsoft. It was in black and white. And for them, they were walking away with skills and experience to empower themselves and a certification to be. It was just going with it. It was brilliant, they were loving that part. But obviously with that, you know a lot of people got worried about taking the exam when they had to. You know some costs associated with it and then there were some discussions about who would cover the cost. In the meantime, the solution was a theory test application. So we added learned questions into it. We used some of the learned questions that we found on MSL and then we added what we thought were questions that were more specific to this organization that we you know what kind of common things do we come across. We added those questions in, built an entire package and then, when we thought someone was ready, we assigned them a theory test. In this Canvas application it was timed. You had a timer at the time. You had to monitor everything. You'd go through and you'd click it out and we'd have you know all the details for what they filled out. Did they pass, did they fail? What did they go wrong? On what did they go wrong? And then we could see that. And we could use the details from this to benchmark them. And this was where things got cool to me, because in I know, some people don't like being graded, but I think it's very important to grade your skillset as you grow and it lets you know that you're learning and you're moving up. Yes, yes. As you move up, we put you in different Azure security groups automatically. Gotcha and what this will do, is it? will grant you access to different environments, and these different environments have different data loss prevention policies, meaning now you're getting more capability as well as that. Obviously we, you know you give you badges. Everyone loves a badge. I love a badge, I'm sure you do, yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 27:15
So what was the name of your badges?

AJ Zafar: 27:17
Well, the badges were. I'll be honest, the badges were just the power platform stars. I gave them out to a few of the people, so you have a power ups level one, level two, level three, yeah yeah, yeah. Stars. Next to them I see people bad that I never got around to making them for Kieran because he'd already exceeded the stars, so I never went back and retrospectively gave him one, yeah, but the other new guys joining, I'd give them some stars and tell them you're level one, you're level two, oh my God, congrats, fantastic, you made it to level three, yeah, and it was really fantastic. Hopefully. I think that helped actually really encourage, put the growth even more, because after we started to gamify things with either with the exams originally there is now you know and with levels, I think that pushed people to want to get better. I even was cheeky with that. I told people I was like hey Tom, hey Tom, you know Kieran's already moved to level two. He's doing these things. He's making JavaScript, web resources and model-driven. Yeah, he's doing this, he's doing that. But for Kieran, I was telling him about how Tom was doing. He's doing stuff with web resources. Oh, did you know? He's making responsive apps right now. You know all those cool things. I loved having a bit of fun competition and they do what I have a laugh about it.

Mark Smith: 28:29
Yeah, I love it.

AJ Zafar: 28:31
That was good.

Mark Smith: 28:33
What do you think the cost impact on the business was? I've heard a number as in. Once again, it's amazing I'll be on the other side of the world and hear stuff right. I heard a number of around 600,000 pounds. Was the impact of just enabling the citizen development part inside that organization? Was that a fact that I heard or was it made up?

AJ Zafar: 28:56
I believe it was greater than that. But yeah, if you're talking about the first year. I thought it was closer to around 600,000 to 800,000. Because I know by the past combined two years I thought it was above 1.2 million. But I may need to fact check myself to them.

Mark Smith: 29:10
But yeah, but it just shows the power of what you created there and creating community. One other question I have in that context, and this is a complaint I get from a lot of IT departments where Power Platform has been deployed as an IT initiative and of course, their first thing they do is put, they lock everything. I heard recently of one IT department that anytime somebody created an app, they would go in and just delete it. No, it's all about control, all about instruction, all about it's part of M365, it's a seated license, but that's not what we want, and so, of course, people find ways. One of their biggest complaints is we don't want to support these people. What do they do when they have a problem? How do I do this? How do I do that? How do we don't support it? And so one of the things that have developed is this whole forum concept. Like you have a Microsoft forums online, but the same thing that just runs inside the organization so they can talk about information pertaining to the business, but they support each other. How do I do a JavaScript to do blah, blah, blah? Someone that's already done it says, hey, this is how you do it, and then I give XP points, experience points to the answer that gets marked right and also to the person asking the question. So that's part of the gamification, right? They want to be the one that answers correctly, so therefore they're supporting each other, but also there's an incentive to ask questions quickly, because you get points as well. You're developing a good muscle, leverage our combined knowledge inside the business. So did you do anything around that? When I first came across it, they called it support and I found it was too much like application app support or what do they call it. But this whole cross-pollination they support each other rather than having to raise a ticket with the IT desk. What did you do in that space?

AJ Zafar: 31:16
It almost entirely had to be that because, as you said, it did not wish to support it because they had a lot on their plate. They did. It wasn't like they didn't have a day job, and I respected that, and us cranking out over what was it? 100 applications was definitely a lot to support if they did support it. So the solution was this you could ask questions. Well, it's Viva Engage now, but at the time it was Yammer. We had a Yammer page, we had teams chats and we had the drop-in sessions and, to be fair, most of the questions were answered on the drop-in sessions. But you also had a lot of people raising things in teams chats. I did wish the Yammer page took off a bit more, but, in regards to that, one of my good friends, who's more cool with Viva, told me some cool tricks that I should have done at the time, but obviously since then I've moved on but some good tricks and tips in terms of how to drive engagement, linking people into that, and some points that you just mentioned were one of them, which was GammaFire Make a Point system, make a Praise system, because that's a feature within it. Use that system, which isn't something I was particularly doing. And they also suggested after someone builds an application, they take a screenshot of that. Nothing dodgy, nothing confidential, just a screenshot of the interface. I built this. It does this. It's really awesome. What do you think? I love it. It inspires people and it lets people know like, oh, this is Bob from that team. He's not a dev, but he's built something really cool. Could I build something cool? And it's all part of that journey encouraging people on and helping them build self-support apps. And if you tell people how to build an app in the right way, with testing and all this other good stuff often it's packed up and stuff because they're often solving personal issues and team issues that are smaller or sometimes even bigger things. They don't need as much support. Because my ex left to build some really robust systems and with the SIT Dev guys, they weren't using as much crazy. They weren't building custom PCF components, they were using Java web resources, but it was quite familiar to them and they were able to do that very successfully. And on the one point you touched on in terms of IT feeling like they should need to split, I think I respect IT, wanting to support everything that shows IT's mindset, but you don't really go around supporting Word documents, right, and the common thing I saw was people say, oh, would this automate flow can send automated emails to people and it can send forms and data. Well, I always say, but we'll work and do that with mail merge, right, yeah, yeah. How many of those are you monitoring? Do you check to make sure those mail mergers aren't sending bulk ones to certain people? What's in?

Mark Smith: 33:52
the Word document.

AJ Zafar: 33:53
Are they getting data from an Excel? Are you supporting Excel? You're not. Our platform is just another tool to make people productive. Imagine the productivity boom we had when we released Microsoft. I released Microsoft documents and we were empowered to use them. It was huge Power platforms the next level.

Mark Smith: 34:13
I totally agree. Final words before I let you go.

AJ Zafar: 34:16
Final words, power platform is awesome. Stopping your makers and users from using it prevents them from innovating, and you want innovators in your business. You want value creators and power platforms A huge, impressive tool that you have from Microsoft to allow people to do that. So don't block it. Enable it.

Mark Smith: 34:37
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'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 bymeocoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.