Stirring up Success: Enea Licaj's Flavorful Fusion of Power Platform Innovation and Culinary Artistry

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Germany. He works at Nova Capita as a business consultant. He was first awarded as MVP in 2024. During weekends he dedicates his time to his YouTube channel, where he enjoys creating content for the Power Platform. Nothing brings him more joy than reading comments that indicates how helpful his videos and posts have been to someone somewhere in the world. You can find links to his bio, social media etc. In the show notes for this episode. Enya, welcome to the show.

Enea Licaj: 1:35
Thank you very much for having me, Mark.

Mark Smith: 1:38
It's good to have you on the show. I'm excited to hear your story today. Why don't we start off with food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Enea Licaj: 1:47
Food, family and fun. I love cooking, so food is, of course, one of my favorite hobbies, and family is the most important in the world, of course. I have a little daughter now since one and a half years and which I'm enjoying very much, and uh, yeah, for fun, I uh enjoy reading books and uh going doing some sports nice, nice and the area in germany you live in, what's it most well known for?

Enea Licaj: 2:17
Cologne is well known for well, some would say their beer, but that's up for discussion. But other than that, we have a lot of history here. Cologne is one of the oldest cities in Germany, since it was. As you see, cologne comes from Colonia, which means colony, from the Romans. So all this, and we have a lovely river which goes through this whole city and one of the biggest cathedrals in the world, so that's very nice to visit as well.

Mark Smith: 2:49
Very cool, very cool. How did you… and cool people, and cool people. That's the main thing. That's the main thing. That's the main thing. How did you get into tech? What was your journey?

Enea Licaj: 3:00
yeah, well, uh, I studied computer science, uh, with, uh, with a touch of um, of business and administration and um, then I moved into my first consultant role based on UC, so it was like first time in a full-time role.

Enea Licaj: 3:24
And I went into UC Microsoft and I was doing Skype for Business and then I moved a little bit more into the user adoption part, because it was very new and people were used to using like decked phones, so picking it up and talking, and then it was that massive change for so many companies and so I was good at communicating and that's why I moved a little bit more from technical into the communication part, so user adoption, trainings, so on and so forth, and that's where a spark for creating content also a bit started. But I haven't started creating content yet. Um, I just enjoyed talking to people and teaching them and showing them how to do stuff and so on. Yeah, and later on moved to microsoft teams. Of course, as we all know what came later after skype for business and um, yeah, so that was like my start into tech, then later on discovered Power Platform and so on and so forth.

Mark Smith: 4:22
So tell me about that discovery of the Power Platform. How did that come about?

Enea Licaj: 4:27
Sure, during my journey in the consultant world in the um I also it was also my beginning of my career, I'm not been working so for that long at full time and I was testing here and there different roles and during that time I tried moving into a pmo role, so where I was like doing a little bit of project management, testing it out, looking how it feels like, and so on and so forth. And we used to have in the previous company a lot of bottlenecks when it came to managing these projects. And funny, because the company was managing the projects by using PowerPoint and Excel, so that was like a lot of maintenance needed. And we had weekly meetings PowerPoint and Excel, so that was like a lot of maintenance needed. And we had like weekly meetings where we talked about the project that were up and running and how were they going like next steps, what the issues are, and so on and so forth. And the project managers had to update those PowerPoints every week and then the PMO manager had to put them all together and then do like a PowerPoints every week. And then the PMO manager had to put them all together and then do like a PowerPoint presentation every week, which is consuming so much time.

Enea Licaj: 5:42
And then I was looking for solutions, how to make this a little bit easier, because you may say I'm a bit lazy, but that's what motivates me to find automated stuff and find solutions, and yeah. So then I figured out okay, why don't we just move into a more centralized let's call it database, which is not actually? We move to SharePoint, sharepoint lists, and we use that as a simple and cheap solution to centralize the data at least. And then all the information was put there by the project managers. And of course, we needed that visual part, which was PowerPoint before. And yeah, so how to visualize that data? Let's go to Power BI. We used to have E5 licenses and we never used Power BI, which is also like crazy and so much potential. They're missing. So, yeah, so that was the beginning SharePoint and Power BI, and to make repetitive tasks in between also automated.

Enea Licaj: 6:42
I tested out Power Automate, and then the last piece was because I was enjoying it so much that I said, okay, why don't we make the front end a little bit more customizable, a little bit more prettier or easier for the users? And then I tried playing alone with Power Apps and yeah, that's how it took off and yeah. So later on, when I saw that, okay, that potential was very big but the company was working, was concentrating on UC stuff, right, so they were doing 99% only consultancy and implementation for Microsoft Teams and I wanted to continue my journey in the Power Platform, they didn't have that interest. So I said, okay, I'm not sticking around to do here and there bits and then maintain something like that, I want to go into the front and consultant full-time Power Platform. And then I moved. Like that, I want to go into the front and consultant full-time platform. And then I moved to Nova Capital. So that's the journey, yeah yeah, that's incredible.

Mark Smith: 7:44
That's incredible. How did you find picking up the tools as in for the first time? Obviously you were pioneering everything that you were doing. What was your process for kind of going okay, what else is in the toolkit, what am I going to use? Did somebody else introduce you to it? How did you discover, or was it just that the licenses were sitting there in E5 and you took it from there?

Enea Licaj: 8:10
I didn't even know that. To be honest, I was not that aware of the licenses, to be honest, around the Power Platform, so I was just Googling where, where can I easily store data? That was, I think, one of my prompts. And then it comes. Like you write also in Microsoft Tools and then it comes SharePoint. You will get to Excel and SharePoint most of the time. So I said, okay, what's SharePoint? Let's take a look. And then there are so many content creators out there and the one from whom I learned the most was Shane Young, and yeah, so that's how I started then doing more professional stuff.

Mark Smith: 8:53
Wow, that's amazing. And so in your current role, are you a full-time consultant then on the Power Platform?

Enea Licaj: 9:00
Exactly so now I've been in Nova Captor for over three years and I'm a full-time Power Platform developer and also a consultant. And I'm also moving into because you know the Power Platform is so huge you cannot be an expert on all of the tools, and so I decided to move a little bit more into you will laugh now because I'm a MVP on Power Apps but I decided to move more as a tech lead for Power BI. So I still do Power Apps and Power Automate, but one of my favorite tools is actually Power BI and yeah, so the needs in the company is for a tech lead in Power BI, because I was the only one and now we are three people and so I'm building that team up.

Mark Smith: 9:48
And so have you started using Fabric, then, as part of that Power BI mix.

Enea Licaj: 9:53
We are in the beginnings of using Fabric. The problem with Fabric is that it's not that easy to start as it is with Power BI Now, because Power BI when we present it as a tool you can just open it and your desktop is for free, and then show it how it looks like the developer and then maybe publish it in your own workspace, which is again for free, as if you want to publish it or to share it with another one. Then that's where it starts to require a license. But with Fabric then you need a capacity and so on. It's a little bit more complicated. So now I'm working with my team to build a POC or a sandbox where we can build something in Fabric and have it as a showcase for companies. But up until now we have not received any customers who are ready.

Mark Smith: 10:42
Also, their data is ready to move into fabric right, because it needs to work both now and so are you building, like your own, um, visualizations, chart objects, that type of thing.

Enea Licaj: 10:55
You do custom builds of those um, we, we use like something like zebra bi and so on. So there are visuals like third-party visuals, which allow you to write some code and build a little bit of visualizations in there Not from ground up, like you can do as well. Of course, I think that's a bit too technical for the moment and the requests have been almost near to zero in our case for 100% customized visuals. So we use something like that if it needs to be a bit more custom, but up until now we have been actually happy with the Summit ones.

Mark Smith: 11:39
Yeah, yeah, just a bit of interest in the German market. How much has the power platform grown in Germany? And, just from what you know, how big is the job market in Germany? How many people are really starting to build careers around the space, to your knowledge?

Enea Licaj: 12:01
Yeah. So I don't know exact numbers, but I see on what I see on LinkedIn, in the past two years it has grown exponentially because you see, the potential on these tools is so big that you can build solutions in such a short time and the companies have started to realize it as well. Of course, in the foreign markets like US and so on, this has been the case for the last four or five years maybe, but here the last two years it's skyrocketing and we also see a lot of requests for trainings. So we not only develop the tools that's actually the best case for the companies also get the most profit. But a lot of companies just require or ask us if we provide trainings for Power Automate. I had a couple of weeks ago a couple of Power Automate trainings. Copilot now is a big thing, and so on and so forth. Power Apps, power BI, dash from the Day. You know all this stuff. They're very highly in demand at the moment.

Mark Smith: 13:10
How much is co-pilot for Power BI entering the mix for you? Are you doing lots of POCs? Are you validating that a lot? What are the use cases that excites you?

Enea Licaj: 13:22
At the moment it's in very, very early stages if you compare it with Copilot Studio or Copilot in 365. So Copilot in Power BI is, for us at least, in a very early stage where we hadn't had very many opportunities to show it or to test it. But as of excitement, I see I've seen the slides where Microsoft shows you can click, you can ask there and then you get a whole dashboard done or a whole report done. I don't know how much that's going to work in real life because you need the perfect data, but I see potential If you have seen the whole Fabric slide where you have all those Azure bits, then you have Power BI and then you have the data activator.

Enea Licaj: 14:14
I don't know if you've heard of it. I mean, this whole synergy is what excites me more. Copilot would be nice for the end user maybe to ask a question on the data, or maybe the end user was trying to build a report by themselves. Okay, help me with this DAX equation here. But I see more on the higher level where the user is going to use something like the data activator to gain insights and notifications and then maybe start a workflow if something happens with my report in a specific visual, like a gauge or something like that, and I see a lot of potential there to automate all those reactions. So not only acting but also the reacting part.

Mark Smith: 15:06
You know Power BI for some time has had the Q&A type function in it where you can query and make new charting objects. Is the co-pilot functionality really just an enhancement on that at this point?

Enea Licaj: 15:19
It is more than that, of course. It is more than that because it has the potential to, because the Q&A part you needed to ask exactly the name of the column. So, for example, you have a column countries or a column country, if you write the country word in the question, then it would find it. Otherwise it was too dumb to do it. So what I see? Coppola is going to over overcome that issue with its artificial intelligence and then maybe go find country where it seems okay, germany is a country, then that's something that he's looking for only now. So that's, that's the difference, which I what I see, and I hope as well.

Mark Smith: 16:03
Yeah, makes sense In your content creation. Are you doing that all in English, or are you doing?

Enea Licaj: 16:11
it in German.

Enea Licaj: 16:12
Yeah, actually, with my naivety at the beginning, I started doing it in English and in German. So the first videos if you dig deep in my content channel, you will see that the first videos were the same, once in English and once in German. But that was so much time which I didn't have, and I was okay, what have I committed to at the moment? And then at some point I said okay, I saw that the English ones were having more views and then I've switched completely to English, which was, at the end of the day, a good decision, because I've seen during my career now a lot of customers who also try during the training zones, also try to learn by themselves, by using YouTube, for example. They also Google in English because they say in English are the most of the contents and also if you Google in Google, you will ask in English most of the contents, and also if you Google in Google, you will ask in English most of the time, especially for such cases, they don't ask in German, which is funny, but that's the reality.

Mark Smith: 17:14
Interesting, interesting. I encourage a lot of people in the community globally to do it in their native language because it helps more people in their native language, because you know it helps more people in their own community, because English tends to be well represented. But it's interesting. You notice the data showing you what's getting the most engagement. What's been your biggest career highlight?

Enea Licaj: 17:38
My biggest career highlight actually was, I would say I would say, two, because the first one was when I discovered the Power Platform, because that changed my career completely, the direction it was taking. At the beginning I wasn't very sure if I'm going to stick with these tools Microsoft at all, maybe, who knows but yes, that was like a turning point for me. I loved tools from the beginning. And another moment I would say was not that far along, where I finished one of my favorite projects I'm not allowed to say the name, unfortunately, of the customer, but one of my favorite projects and it was a Power BI project with a little bit of Power Apps as well inside of Power BI, and the nice part about that was that we spent a lot of time on the design, which is something that very few companies invest when they come to us for Power BI projects.

Enea Licaj: 18:50
For Power Apps it's a little bit different, because Power Apps you need to invest some time in UI and UX, but for Power BI they only want to see those numbers, which, okay, that is the point actually. But you can do so much more if you invest a little bit more time into where you put the numbers, where you put the visualizations maybe implement like a navigation into your report. You can do so much with it, and that was exactly. That was the perfect customer, I would say, and that was something I enjoyed really, really much, and yeah, so that's very cool.

Mark Smith: 19:24
That's very, very cool. My last question for you today is what's been the biggest, uh, technical challenge you've had to overcome with business applications or the power platform?

Enea Licaj: 19:39
I think uh, one of our latest customers, uh wanted so they have a lot of data and the data that they were receiving. So let's start from the bottom back. So they wanted to attach the repos that we were building to a data source and the data source was actually not able to talk with it over an API able to talk with it over an API. So the only way that we could get the data was over a CSV export, which was like a recurrence every week or every day, depending on how often we did it. And that report then was going to be live, so we had to work around with our data team as well. And then we went and fixed that by pulling the data with Azure Signups and putting that into Signups and then connecting Power BI to Signups, which was something very new for me. I understood the concept, but I never tested it again. But that was one of the biggest technical difficulties that I had to overcome.

Mark Smith: 20:58
Awesome, inge, if you were talking to somebody that says how do I become an MVP? What's your one bit of advice you give them.

Enea Licaj: 21:11
First of all, you need to create content and do stuff around for the community about the tools that you love. If you don't believe in the tools, if you don't like the tools, you don't use them enough, then I don't think that you can fake it for a long time. So you need to find the tools that you love first and then start talking about them. It doesn't matter if they're highly on demand or not, because when I started it was on demand, but when Shane Yang started it was not that much on demand as it was when I started. So you know what I mean. So find the tools that you love, do content, write about them, speak about them and then everything else will come by itself. This is maybe something a fun fact. This is my second try on my MVP. The first one, I did not get it. So the second one, I then got it. So stick around as well and keep going, and if the first time or the second time doesn't work, the third time will work and just keep doing your thing.

Mark Smith: 22:19
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check outmeacoffeecom forward slash nz365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you you.