Balancing Governance and Innovation in Power Platform with Valentin Mazhar

Mark Smith: 0:06
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 Spain. He works at Zurich Insurance as the M365 solution architect for the Power Platform governance. His first award is MVP in 2024. He's passionate about the Power Platform. His focus has shifted from building business solutions solo to empowering the global workforce to embrace this incredible low-code platform. You can find links to his bio, show notes, et cetera in the show notes for this episode, so check in your favorite app. Welcome to the show, Valentin.

Valentin Mazhar: 1:07
Thanks, Mark. Thanks for having me. Super happy to be here.

Mark Smith: 1:11
Good to have you on the show. I take it you're not Spanish by birth. Where are you from originally?

Valentin Mazhar: 1:17
Correct, I'm from Paris, just outside Paris. If I say I'm from Paris to a real Parisian, they will tell me I'm not so 20, 30 kilometers south of Paris. But I'm living in Barcelona now and loving it.

Mark Smith: 1:32
Not to get into politics, but I just see this week some big changes in the elections in France.

Valentin Mazhar: 1:38
I know, I know, I know let's not talk about it. I'm not really happy about how it's going and I prefer to speak about the power platform than politics at the moment.

Mark Smith: 1:50
Tell me about food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Valentin Mazhar: 1:58
Food, family and fun oh, these are three of the most important things in my life. I've always been really, really into food. One of the first words I learned to pronounce was it's the equivalent of gravy in French and sweets. I just wanted more and more food all the time. So I'm a big foodie. I lived in London for a while and enjoyed the differences between France and the UK and now enjoying the Spanish tapas as well. Family as well. I've got some family from Morocco, some family from France. I'm now married, since very recently, to a British woman, so inheriting from the British side of her family and fun is something I try to have all the time, as well in my personal life as in my work life.

Mark Smith: 2:52
So what type of things do you do for fun? Are you into gaming? Are you into sports? What is it for you?

Valentin Mazhar: 2:58
Oh, at the moment I'm really enjoying running. Now that we live near the beach, it's something I I can't get enough of it. Uh, going around in the morning. Uh, it's best way for me to start a walk day is by going for a run early in the morning. Um, to get something good. You know, do something good for the mind and the body before even starting work. This is great. I used to like squash a lot, but I haven't played since we moved to spain. It's very warm to play squash here.

Mark Smith: 3:27
Yes, yes, yeah, definitely.

Valentin Mazhar: 3:29
And before that I was really into mountain biking, actually in France, so we would build the tracks in the woods and then ride them with the bikes, but I haven't done that for a long time.

Mark Smith: 3:43
Wow, you could try biking up Mount Tibidabo.

Valentin Mazhar: 3:47
Yeah, I could, I could. It's very high. I was more into jumping, not that much cycling. Yes, yes, yes.

Mark Smith: 3:58
Very cool, very cool. Tell me about Zurich Insurance. That's a Swiss company, isn't it?

Valentin Mazhar: 4:05
Correct correct. So that's a big insurance group, One of the leading insurers in the world today, Presenting about 200 territories, countries and territories. Today it's about 60,000 employees. I joined them three years and a half ago now. Uh, specifically to focus on the power platform and build, or um, the power platform center for enablement, their center of excellence. Uh, essentially, Um, and still there today and having a lot of fun in that world.

Mark Smith: 4:40
I love it. So your center for enablement, is it um? Is it like? Like is the core part of the team in Barcelona, or is it where in the world?

Valentin Mazhar: 4:52
Not at all actually, so I report to the headquarters. They're based in Switzerland, in Zurich, and the rest of the team is based in Slovakia and Romania at the moment, so it's very remote.

Mark Smith: 5:04
Yeah, interesting, because I know that I used to work in Australia for a bit. And Zurich, sorry. Yeah, zurich was a big brand there as well. It's very well known around the world, right.

Valentin Mazhar: 5:18
Yeah, yeah, it is widely known and you know the company very popular.

Mark Smith: 5:25
Yeah, very cool. Tell me about how did you, how did your career? How did you get into tech to start with, before you even got into the Power Platform?

Valentin Mazhar: 5:36
All right. So I was really into math when I was a student. I loved math. I used to really it sounds a bit geeky and nerdy, but I'll be honest about it. When we would go to my grandparents' house during holidays, I used to love asking my grandparents to give me math problems. They were a physics teacher and a math teacher.

Valentin Mazhar: 6:04
I just enjoyed it. It was really fun. Um try trying solve problem um. And then um, after I don't know how you guys call it in new zealand um, after passing the baccalaureate in french, the a levels they call them in the uk when I was towards 18, had to pick what I was going to do next and I decided to go for a master's degree in engineering, in general engineering, and that was a way for me to stay close to the science, without deciding exactly what I was going to do yet, because I didn't know at that time.

Valentin Mazhar: 6:36
And towards the end of that master's course I specialized in digitalization or digital tool, but it was very wide, very broad. But that's when I really got hooked on the IT world or technology. And then after that I had met my partner, who is now my wife, and she was living in London. So I had to find my priority was really to find an opportunity to go back to London to move in together with her, because the long distance Paris, london was not the best situation possible and the job I found at that time in London was to work for a food retail business. I don't know if you know the Laughing Cow, babybel, those products, those cheese products, no.

Mark Smith: 7:25
No, I isn't yeah.

Valentin Mazhar: 7:28
Now I can see the picture in my mind of it.

Mark Smith: 7:30
Yes, yeah.

Valentin Mazhar: 7:31
Round round cheese. Yeah, so I joined them in London as the IT manager at that time, so it was a very broad role, had many hats the hat of the IT support guy to tell you to turn your laptop off and on if you had an issue. But also I was the only IT guy on site, so I was there to do the link between the headquarters in France and the subsidiary in the UK in terms of IT topics. It was about rolling out a group application to the business units, or whether it was about sharing feedback from the business units about what they needed from group and also supporting the business on site locally, about improving their processes and trying to help them become more productive. And this is when I discovered the Power Platform. I was alone. I had only my two hands. We didn't have that much capacity or resources to hire third parties, but there was a lot to do. And the first project when I got my hands on Power Automate at that time I think it was toward 2016, 2017. They had an invoice management system based on Intex and SharePoint at that time which was costing a fair amount of money and no one to support to maintain it. So the decision was made to move to something else and that something else. I created it with the state of the Power Platform at that time and I loved it.

Valentin Mazhar: 9:02
Then following, I don't know. I think it's the usual story. I really started as a maker. I wanted to do more of it. I created a lot of things. It would be everywhere. I tried to improve and help however I could and after about two years and a half I decided I wanted to fully focus on it. I didn't want to ask people to turn their laptop off and on anymore. I just wanted to do Power Platform. And this is when I found this opportunity in Zurich to build a center of excellence fully dedicated to that technology and that platform. That's a long answer to a short question, but it gives you a little bit of history.

Mark Smith: 9:42
That's good. That's good, that's that's. It's so interesting that, um, uh, yeah, I commonly see this people accidentally fall or or come across the technology and then they like, wow, this is amazing, I want to do this more seriously. Um, very cool, tell me about.

Valentin Mazhar: 10:00
Um how'd you find out about the MVP program? How did you get nominated? How did you get involved in it? Give math lessons to younger students when I was in the engineering school, so I really like I've always liked to explain things or share information sometimes even too much, I think, if you ask my friends, but I so I had this in mind and I was seeing. I knew about the MVP program because I was following MVPs who helped me creating a lot of the solutions I was creating at that time in London. I learned about Power Apps pretty much by looking at Shane Young's video on YouTube. At that time there was not that many MVP sharing Power Platform stuff. In 2016, 2017. Shane Young's videos were everywhere and so this is how I knew about the program.

Valentin Mazhar: 11:04
And then, when I moved into this governance world and building the Center for Enablement, I realized that there wasn't that much governance-specific content about the Power Platform. It's really you find a lot of content to create things, but not so much to govern them. It makes sense because there are more people creating stuff than admins governing them, right, but I contemplated that for a while. I thought, you know, I really enjoyed the topic of power platform governance how to make this platform a true enabler in a company. The technology is one thing, but there's a lot of things around the technology to make it a success.

Valentin Mazhar: 11:44
So I was passionate about that. I was thinking maybe I could share about it. I was really intimidated about launching to the out external world. I was doing it in the company for a while, but it felt very different to do it properly out there. I had some suggestions from other MVPs, especially Nacho Sepa, who strongly advised and just told me just go for it, you know, and just give it a go. So I started a blog. Powertricksio spent far too much time understanding how WordPress worked to start the blog instead of focusing on the content, but I'm enjoying it now and I've been sharing a few things here and there about reusable tools and mostly things that I create to help admins govern the Power Platform at scale.

Mark Smith: 12:36
I love it. I love your tagline low code, high impact.

Valentin Mazhar: 12:42
Yeah, I was looking for a catchy phrase.

Mark Smith: 12:45
Power platform governance. It's interesting, interesting. I take it you're well familiar with the COE kit and the tooling that comes. Are you just as familiar with managed environments?

Valentin Mazhar: 13:00
Yes, I know what they are and I follow it from very close to understand what those managed environments are, what the functionalities are.

Valentin Mazhar: 13:12
I have, I think, one of the challenges for organizations like ours started with the governance of the Power Platform a long time ago. At that time there was really only the series starter kit, so we would install it, we customized it, you build on top of it, you make it work exactly the way you need it to work, which is great, and then you see those out of the box platform features for governance that come up one after the other. Some of the time it's only the in-product experience for some things that we have built in a custom way before, and so if it was just a matter of replacing what we built by out-of-the-box things, which is better, right, you have less technical depth, less things to maintain, but when you think about the cost it comes with, it is not always. The return on investment is not always easy to justify, and in the case of managed environments, this is the main blocker that I see in organizations in general, right.

Mark Smith: 14:17
You're the perfect person to have a debate with. I've just finished a presentation which I'll be delivering in Vegas at the Power Platform Conference and it's called the Fallacy of Free, why Free Licensing is Not Cheaper for the Power Platform. And I go into the total cost of ownership and I would be interested to see if you did the research, if you one applied the TCO kind of rigor around what you do, whether it's more expensive to run your custom tooling as opposed to going, because what you're saying is premium licensing is too expensive, right?

Valentin Mazhar: 15:05
Not so much I think we have. You know I am all in for the premium capabilities and even beyond the governance topics, I think you see today out there in different companies far too many solutions that are built using SharePoint when really they should be using Dataverse or some better place to put the data, not only because people are not familiar always on how to configure security properly on SharePoint, but also because it just presents so many more capabilities, and so I'm a strong defensor of premium capability in general by the Power Platform. The case of managed environment I think it's not as black and white topic. I think the functionalities of managed environment they're great. Many of them are spot on. But I also think that it's not always the case that it's going to make an organization's life easier.

Valentin Mazhar: 16:05
Today. Or if a company has a premium license for everyone, then there's no question they should use managed environments and it will make pretty much every area of their life, of governance and different things, better. But for a company that is using some premium licenses and not all premium licenses, then you imagine an ecosystem with, I don't know, 50% of managed environments, 50% of non-managed environments. I think there's some things around environment groups and some of the characteristics of environment groups don't necessarily match with the way we manage our environments and the DLP policies today, and so it doesn't mean that they're doing it wrong. It just means that it's not only a matter of equipping how we adjust, the way we govern and the way we work with the actual uh, where the the platform is designed now is those, those additional features. So there's there's the cost. You could estimate the cost of what we're doing today, the cost of if you are fully adopting the those technology, that the additional features, but then there's also the cost of moving from what we have now to a fully premium.

Mark Smith: 17:30
So I love this topic. I think that we need to do probably another podcast over on my Power Platform show where we drill into the pros and cons of premium versus non-premium and what use cases absolutely should sit in the state of non-premium licensing. What use cases you know absolutely should sit in the state of you know, non-premium licensing, but really what should, or basic licensing and then what should be premium. I would love that discussion in in wrapping up, because I know we're already over time, tell me about the experience being. You're so new to coming into the mvp program. What has that experience been like for you being onboarded into the program?

Valentin Mazhar: 18:09
It feels like there's a lot for me to explore that I haven't had a chance to explore yet. To give you the full story, I think I was I can't remember if it was in May or in June I was nominated, but after we were at the middle of planning our wedding with my now wife and then we got married and then we had a honeymoon and we only recently moved back and now we're trying to sort out our living situation because she's pregnant of twins.

Mark Smith: 18:38
Wow, twins. Congratulations. I know, that's amazing, I know.

Valentin Mazhar: 18:42
So it's a big year, but from what I've seen, what I've had a chance to take a look at yet, it just feels like it opened the doors to a really huge community with a lot happening everywhere. I had already a chance to meet a few MVP guys like you, mark, and so it's very exciting for me and speaking with other like-minded folks also interested in Microsoft products and a power platform and for me so far it's just fantastic. I just wait to have enough time to invest to discover all the great stuff around this MVP program.

Mark Smith: 19:24
Hey, thanks for listening. 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 out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.