Empowering the Future Workforce through Digital Solutions with Rafsan Huseynov

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 Washington DC in the US. He works at Caterpillar as a senior IT program manager and enterprise architect. His first award is MVP in 2024. He has a passion to help project management communities, including students, to upskill themselves in development. You can find links to his bio in the show notes for this episode. Social media links, et cetera will be there. Welcome to the show, rafsan Hi Mark. Thanks for the invitation.

Rafsan Huseynov: 1:35
Rafsan. Hi Mark, Thanks for the invitation. It's a pleasure being here. I think I'm really excited to share my journey with you Again, it's a pleasure.

Mark Smith: 1:47
Excellent. Did I pronounce your name right? Correct? It's Rafsan Excellent, so good to have you on the show. Great to see you become an MVP. To start with, food, family and fun what do they mean to you? Fun fact about me.

Rafsan Huseynov: 2:03
I almost like rarely get bored. I always find something to entertain myself. So, living in DC, I have opportunity to go for a walk, go to the gym, but I also find very fun activity, which is skiing during the wintertime. So I go to Utah or Colorado for skiing. And another thing I travel frequently with my wife to places that you can eat great food. So we go to France, we go to Italy, spain. In fact, next month actually, we are going to Italy, 12 days in Sicily, for you know so and I also studied in Italy, so I'm very well aware of the good food there. Culture. So the fun things again, reading a lot of books, constantly finding something that I can entertain myself. But, yeah, these are the main things. And living in DC, I get the chance to visit Kennedy Center for lots of great activities, shows from all over the world, and I'm loving it.

Mark Smith: 3:10
Amazing, Amazing. It's interesting you mentioned Italy there. It's my wife and my favorite country, Definitely number one, and that's a hard place to get to, because I love Spain, I love Portugal, I love all of Europe really. But Italy is definitely that country. We're going to go. Stay there for a month next year. Just set it as our base. Take our two young kids uh will be their first big, you know, global travel, um and stay for a month so we can do a couple of conferences up there and uh.

Mark Smith: 3:41
But just use Italy as a base camp because, man, you can't beat the food, you can't beat the culture, everything right the you can. You know, I've I've done a lot of exploring of the Northern part of Italy down as far as Rome, but I've not done anything from Rome and below. So we've got to explore that, Sicily, the Amalfi Coast, all those areas and some great. There's been MVPs in the BizApp program, for the OG is from the southern part of Italy, MVP, Italian MVP, and he owes me a pizza and he guarantees it's not going to have any pineapple on it, it's going to be, you know, the OG pizza, and so I'm looking forward to that happening.

Rafsan Huseynov: 4:26
I might be biased, but you'll probably eat the best pizza in Southern Italy. Yeah, I have a lot of friends in Northern Italy. Please just don't get offended, but personally I like pizza in south better yeah, beautiful, beautiful, tell me about.

Mark Smith: 4:44
Uh, there's a. There's a bunch of things I want to explore with you. Um, first of all, how did you get into the power platform?

Rafsan Huseynov: 4:51
that's a very great question. I think my journey started when I was doing my first digital project management job back in 2013. I wasn't aware of tech world at all, and then I was involved in this project as a project coordinator and the technical project manager left the job and I had to take ownership of what he has done. He did and that's where I used to work with United Nations and they had this great program where helping agricultural areas with the digitalization of the certain things For example, how you can enter the information and someone, for example, in other side of the country can get real-time update without just calling them or doing something and that's where I just learned how you can be part of this project and help others. And then I started taking some technical studies and in 2016, I actually did my master's degree in Italy in advanced economics. It is economics, but it was purely like statistic, data analytics, data science. I loved it.

Rafsan Huseynov: 6:15
And then I started first programming. It wasn't like the coding side, but it was more like RStudio, and people who use RStudio they know that I would say it's challenging but at the same time, if you learn RStudio, the rest is going to be easier for you, especially Python and then after the university, I started doing the business analysis job. For example, capital One is one of the Fortune 500 companies in the US and that's the time that I exposed myself to data management using these data visualization tools like Tableau, power BI. And then I started using slow to power automate randomly, like I just I had a lot of manual tasks and I'm like that doesn't make sense because every day I do the same exact thing. It's gonna be the better way, and I asked my colleagues and they were doing the same thing, because when you are super busy, actually you have no time for innovation, so you need to think out of box sometimes and I'm always like I love learning. Learning is a big part of me and you can see from the books, and I started just exploring different tools and back in then Power Automate. It wasn't an easy tool at all, but I did some simple use cases for automating manual data adding process and it went really well. And then I started ah, okay, I can do a lot with Power Automate and obviously Power BI was there. To this day, I still don't know why Power BI is part of Power Platform, because it's more data analytics than you know the overall Power Platform designed for, but that's how I exposed myself.

Rafsan Huseynov: 8:05
And then in 2021, I got this great job at project management institutes regarding their citizen development programs running with Microsoft. It was called Power Platform University Hub, so basically I was responsible, helping universities globally and students to learn Power Platform and then join the market. So the first month, what I did, I just took my time to analyze everything and having that I wouldn't say like super deep, but some kind of experience with Power Platform and Power BI helped me to understand Power Apps, then helped me understand you know better, like how can I use Power Automate, especially this desktop form. So I took time to get actually those certifications, to understand the user's journey, in this case, student journey. The more I learned, I started loving it and then I started implementing Power Apps for my internal use cases. For example, we had a lot of manual processes when you work with this massive amount of universities I'm talking about more than 300 global universities and tens of thousands of students so how you can manage that process. At the end, people can get the data they need.

Rafsan Huseynov: 9:35
So I started learning by myself and implementing it, and then I started actually actively engaging with students, having workshops, having hackathons, and that required not only running this program and projects, but also having hands-on experience. So if someone asks you the question, you need to be able to answer the question and show them the right way. If you can't, then it's not credible. So that's why I took time to learn all these and get the certifications, and Microsoft helped me a lot. Actually helping their technical people help me to upskill myself. And then I started helping students from start to finish For example, how you can create your Microsoft 365 developer account, how you can get the Power Apps developer plan and get access to Dataverse, how you can slowly start building something. First it was super easy you can use Excel, but then I teach them, taught them how you can actually go ahead and learn Dataverse. So if you expose yourself to Dataverse, man, dataverse is everything. And then during one of the workshops, I was offered being adjunct professor to teach Power Apps.

Rafsan Huseynov: 11:04
That was, I think, the time that I started learning a lot and implementing in a way that students can understand, because I was hired and I was very passionate and I think it went really well because I got a lot of feedback from the students and my students, like the students that I taught at the university. It was one of the biggest universities in the US. They were master's students and they were mainly like full-time employed people and they're like we wish, like we could have this kind of programs. The reason that I think Power Platform is a great tool for students to upskill themselves in tech because learning Power Platform is limitless. Because once you start Power Platform, you actually expose yourself to Azure that means it's cloud. You expose yourself to Dataverse that's data management. You expose yourself to Copilot Studio that's basically AI, and you know people nowadays talking about Gen AI, but AI Builder has been Power Platform I don't know how many years. So that's what students started.

Rafsan Huseynov: 12:19
You know noticing and my day-to-day job I didn't even have time literally to talk with my manager. I didn't even have time literally to talk with my manager. My job, like I had my different, like my own kingdom every day engaging with students, faculties, and then I started actually helping universities to embed Power Platform into their curriculum. So I think that's a huge improvement because universities, I think, do a really great job of skilling students but, at the same time, how we can make these students job ready, how we can exactly how we can make these students to get jobs. I'm not saying like easy jobs, but you know, computer science students, they get jobs easily because it's in demand. But how about other students? I had students in Africa, so I think it's really impressive and I connected with those people on LinkedIn.

Rafsan Huseynov: 13:23
Some of the students were coming from nursing background and they took the time learning Power Apps, power Ultimate, because I think, like the power there, it's real power, it's empowering people because it's so real. It's so real and I always say, if you have a problem, if you can envision the solution, then that's the tool for you. And I know that, mark, you have a problem. If you can envision the solution, then that's the tool for you. And I know that, mark, you are a little bit careful about citizen development. I think everyone needs to be careful about citizen development, but if organizations have the right deployment strategy and training strategy, I think citizen development can contribute a lot of digital transformation. But in this case, for students, I think learning Power Apps, getting these certifications, updating their resume If you look at the job markets, all these massive companies they need tools.

Rafsan Huseynov: 14:24
They can't keep up with the digital transformation. They need Power Platform and these people to come and start this process. We still we are in the cloud age and we are not actually in the cloud age. We should be in the AI gen AI age and to this day you see organizations running like slowly cloud migration projects. They are still on-prem, so you can imagine how many years do we need to keep up with this change. But the market is competitive, so organizations need this tech talent.

Mark Smith: 14:57
I agree. The thing is with what I was saying with the citizen developer side of things, which you've heard me speak a lot about online, is that I think people have gotten confused with what a citizen developer actually is. If you're building apps all day, you're not a citizen developer. You're now a functional consultant, right, and I remember having this discussion with somebody inside Microsoft a couple of years ago. It only takes really three to six months from somebody going from never touching the power platform to actually being a technologist. If they're going down that rabbit hole and they're going and so the amount of I consider somebody a citizen developer that opens an excel spreadsheet to do their budgeting and that's it right, that's a citizen developer in my mind. They're going to do one thing. They do one little automation or two or three, just personal productivity. I think what's happened is that that phrase is then pushed into what we call a functional consultant or a technologist that can build solutions on the platform.

Rafsan Huseynov: 16:42
I totally agree yeah, and.

Mark Smith: 16:45
But the problem is is that business decision makers hear that you know suzy and accounting to build something and they're like hell, no, not for our company, because they've got an ALM process. Blah, blah, blah. Anyhow, that aside, tell me about then how you ended up in Caterpillar.

Rafsan Huseynov: 17:02
I think, like I received a job offer, like running one of their, like running one of their massive digital transition project which was about basically replacing the existing application portfolio management system with the new cloud based test tool and these projects. Like I would say it's a program actually, because inside that you have a lot of projects and what's basically application portfolio management. It brings entire organization IT portfolio in single system. So from there you can see how many applications you have, what are the IT components, what are the children applications, what are the deployments, and if you look at the most of the organizations nowadays, they are actually in risk paying millions of dollars without understanding that they don't need these applications. And these tools allows people, organizations, to securely run tech obsolescence projects, identifying applications or their components that can pose any threat in their organization or their IT landscape. And then you can do application rationalization. So basically you have Gartner's time framework that stands for tolerate, invest, migrate or eliminate. How you can decide that you need this kind of tools that you can run and gather the data via surveys and create those reports showing that which application needs to be retired, which applications have functional mismatch, where you can increase their technical capacity, where you need applications but you need to improve their better version and et cetera, and then you start with ERP transformation. That's most of the organizations nowadays. In the past, I always worked with ERP solutions and most of the ERP solutions. It's just so hard, it's so cumbersome and there are solutions out there. Literally massive organizations depend on this and once the admin left, the organizations basically just struggle because you didn't keep up with the change, you didn't update in a timely manner, and this is one of the things that I'm doing. Another thing is obviously solutioning the Power Platform, and I did a lot of Power Apps, but now I'm actually starting to use Co-Pilot Studio.

Rafsan Huseynov: 19:54
I have many use cases. So recently I did fun for frequent loss questions. Basically, when you it sounds simple, but let me give you an example. When you have a program that tags every corner of the organization and the organization that has more than 130 people, how you can work with these people? It's impossible and, like this, kind of massive programs has a lot of documentations and someone need job aid. For example, how can I differentiate application versus software, how can I differentiate software versus IT component, et cetera? So you need multiple frequent loss questions, documentations, erd diagrams. So I built like simple chatbot using GenAI feature in Copalisto. It's not 100% there yet, but it works. For simple use case it works. And then you know for next phase I'm planning to add more agent capabilities how it can gather the information. Power Automate can run in the backend and store that information for us. So I think Power Platform is obviously like one of my favorite tools and I use that every day.

Mark Smith: 21:22
Tell me, as I'm already out of time, but I want to get this one last question in. If you were to recommend to other power platform people five books, what five books would you recommend?

Rafsan Huseynov: 21:37
So I would. Some of them are not necessarily related to Power Platform. They shouldn't be.

Mark Smith: 21:44
I would expect none of them would be Exactly Maybe.

Rafsan Huseynov: 21:48
solution architecture Power Platform. Solution architecture book is good because who's the author? I'm really bad at names. I can tell you right now. The name is Hugo Herrera.

Mark Smith: 22:03
Yeah, I've had him on the show about the book. I was just checking it was the same one because more people have come out around the architecture books.

Rafsan Huseynov: 22:10
So I think that's really great book, but I don't recommend starting from that. So that's a book that you need to at least have, like PL 100, pl 200, and then come to there. Then understanding, like solution architecture is really great for solutioning, but I always I can argue with people that technical expertise is great, but once you work with large organizations, having business attitude, having business domain expertise, that's also important Because at the end what happens? You build something that people cannot use.

Mark Smith: 23:00
So what are the business books that you recommend?

Rafsan Huseynov: 23:02
So I recommend, like learning UI UX, like most of the books you can find or you can take, like Google certifications, that's there. But I found like Microsoft touched a little bit UI UX but I didn't find very user intuitive. So I would recommend maybe completing a professional certification for that. If you are more solutioning side and working for large organizations, then learn frameworks, how you can implement power platform projects successfully. That includes proper communication. That includes change management. And when they say change management, I'm not talking about project-level change. I'm talking about organizational-level change. For example, how you start experimenting, how you start scaling. Do you have an adoption strategy? Are you building the solutions that can negatively or positively impact other teams, organizations? How are you going to deal with that? So at the end, you can delete one table and next day? We've been using that table for years. Why did you delete that? Where is the data Next day? We've been using that table for years. Why did you delete that? Where is the data? So understanding, like for me.

Rafsan Huseynov: 24:27
If someone starts there, I always ask them go ahead and try PL900 to understand the overall Power Platform. Are you interested in data analytics side? Then go to Power BI. Are you interested in app development, then go to Power BI. Are you interested in app development? Then go to Power Apps. And if you go to Power Apps, paas, you'll probably use Power Automate a lot. So those are really go hand in hand together. So then, if you're really into development, then start PL100. But I think after PL100, start PL100. But I think after PL100, I would spend most of my time for hands-on development, identifying where there is inefficiency and how can I digitize that using Power Apps and Power Automate. So that's one of the things that I recommend. And also Microsoft has Power Up program. I also graduated that program. I think it's really great. So it's just PL 200 level certification program. Just go ahead and take advantage of that free program. And there are all these great MVPs there. They do free instructor training, so take advantage of that hey, thanks for listening.

Mark Smith: 25:47
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.