Balancing Act: Kirti Prajapati's Insights on Harmonious Living and Game-Changing Power Platform Implementations

Mark Smith: 0:01
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. In this episode, we'll be focusing on large power platform implementations. Today's guest is from India. He works as a modern workplace architect as well as an independent M365 consultant and has a lot of experience on the power platform. You can find links to his bio, social media etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, kiriti. Social media etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, kirti. Thanks, mark.

Kirti Prajapati: 0:47
Thanks for introducing myself and I'm happy to be a part of this podcast.

Mark Smith: 0:54
Fantastic. Listen before we get started. I always like our guests to kind of talk a bit about what they do when they're not working. So food, family and fun what do they mean to you?

Kirti Prajapati: 1:04
So, as you introduce myself as an independent consultant and you know that what are the responsibilities I should have as an independent consultant? To like provide all kind of services the consulting services to the customers, but as a parallel way, these three things are very much important for me, like how I can balance everything while working with customers as an independent consultant and how I can manage those healthy and fulfilling lifestyle along with these three things right? So the first thing, for the food, like I can say the food, I always prefer a kind of homemade food and that could be healthy, and I should have a multiple meals in a small portions, because I know that sometimes I may have to travel or some sometime I may have to sit long hours, uh with the customers or with the developers, so I'm not sure like how, how long it will take for me to get my next food. So I'm always carry kind of small portion of meals, but I'm I make sure that it should be healthy, not allow me to uh like laziness or some uh lower from the activity from my side and uh I'm also a gym lover. So I'm always trying to balance my diet and more focus on the balanced diet with a mixed protein, vegetables, fruits and whole grains. And sometimes, if, if possible, I'm visiting the customers and I may have to visit some restaurants or have to go with lunch or dinner. Then also I'm taking care of that. I should not take much food which can cause any health issues with me. So that's the first thing and most important thing is I am a homemade food lover, so I'm avoiding the outside food most probably in most of the times.

Kirti Prajapati: 3:03
Now come to the family, like like, as you know that we are working as an independent consultant and we have to deal with different set of minds each and every day. So for me family comes first. Right, because you might not have a same day every day. Right, same day is not friday for us, so most of the time every day is Monday, the blue Monday with all the customers. So that's the first priority for me. So I'm always looking out to spend some quality time by scheduling dedicated family time wherever it is possible, and it could be a weekly family meeting or a daily kind of spending 15, 20 minutes with family members, allowing from the busy schedule. And I would also love to involve with my kid in his school activity, so that will motivate me, like how the kids are active like all the day, right, even though they are going full day school, then coming back home, then playing and then homework and everything. So I'm just getting some positive notes from there as well and I'm trying to spend as much as time with my kid. So in my family, my parents are living with me, my wife is a working woman, are living with me, my wife is working woman, so I'm looking after my kid and taking care of all his stuff regarding the schools and other activities, the indoor or outdoor activities. So it it helped me a lot. So family first, as it's my also a support system, and I'm relying on family support during business schedule, because you know that when we are traveling as a consultant, then it may possible that you may have to be outside of your home for long hours or long days. So in my absence, my family members are taking care of everything. So I'm that's the first priority for me to balance this work and family in most of the cases.

Kirti Prajapati: 5:06
And now come to the fun point. So there are a lot of hobbies for different people, but I would love to kind of spare some time with cafe alone, not with anyone, right? Just to like, meditate myself and bring out something new, what I can help to the customers. And then the positive notes on the next day, how I will be in the office and how we'll connect with developers, the customers and others. And also, as I mentioned, that I'm a gym lover so I would prefer to go regularly gym, so that will also motivate me as a fun activity, not kind of bodybuilding, but just to go outside and spare some quality time and connect with different mind of people who are not within your professional right. So that way I will come to know okay what is happening in their life and how they are managing their day-to-day activities.

Kirti Prajapati: 6:07
And then also try to engage some social activities, like in India you might have. That way we have lots of festivals we are celebrating throughout the year. So through the busy schedule it may possible that sometimes I may not visit some social functions or something which is related to my family. So most of the time I'll try to manage everything because as an independent consultant I can go anywhere anytime apart from like I can manage my work here and there, so that helps me a lot. And also trying to plan few of the vacations as a quarterly right along with the family members and try to spend some quality time with those people as well. So this is how I'm trying to balance these three things right now.

Mark Smith: 6:58
Nice, nice. Tell me about who do you currently as in? What projects are you working on at the moment, or which companies are you working for? You know that's top of mind for you right now.

Kirti Prajapati: 7:11
So currently I'm working with Mangalam Infotech and techvizcom, so that's a kind of collaborated company. So earlier I started with Mangalam Infotech as an independent consultant and then working with techwayscom help them to align their digitization process from existing system or third-party system and then pulling some important information into the Microsoft 365 Power Platform ecosystem where they can leverage all possible services to enhance the productivity and allowing their customers to a kind of better product. So nowadays, more focusing on Power Platform developments, which includes any kind of family member you can pick from the Power Platform services like Canvas app, model D1 app, then Power BI reports, then Power Virtual Agent, then Power Pages. But nowadays, from last one and a half years, I am very much involved in the PowerPages and the Model-D1 app implementation. Earlier I was involved in the Canvas app, but nowadays the requirement is coming from how to allow the anonymous user to access our existing data.

Kirti Prajapati: 8:40
So, working on a couple of projects with a large audience more than 75,000 concurrent users for both the portals I'm involved in the architecture in the portal as well as the information architecture and governance model and then security model for all the in-house authenticated users as well as the anonymous users, and have used heavily custom development with PCF controls and some plugins created that can be reusable for other projects or other components for the same customers as well and, apart from this, heavily customize the Power BI reports which can help the customer's management to get a glimpse like where we are and what can be done. So these Power BI services reports created using the Power Automate, like pulling out the data, use the Power Automate, then bring the workspace report into the workflow, create PDF file and send to the relevant management people because they are not looking into the portal every time, so they just need a kind of report in PDF file. So that kind of custom implementation are doing nowadays for the Power Portal projects.

Mark Smith: 10:03
Nice. One of the reasons for this podcast is to focus on some of the big implementations happening around the world in the Power Platform space, and you talked about 75,000 users, so that's big. Anything over 20,000, I consider a big project or with a big user base. With that in mind, can you tell me a bit about without mentioning who the customer is, because you need to keep that private, but from a perspective of what industry are they in? What geography in the world? What can you tell us about the industry and customer that's been served? But also then, further than that, what was the problem that they needed solving, that the Power Platform was the right choice?

Kirti Prajapati: 10:46
so, uh, there are a couple of customers uh, I am working with one with the uh in europe region and one in the epic region.

Kirti Prajapati: 10:54
So both both the customers have different set of pain problems to like address with any any technology, not not only power. But when they came to us and then we realized, okay, this is the option we can offer for this implementation. So let's say, for an example, that's one UK-based company and they are planning to provide these bicycles on a higher basis. If your organization is having around like 10 000 employees and you want to like have a good mental health and the physical health, uh, with the company policies, and you are trying to get some discount from the dealer, right, and you are renting out those bicycles to your employees, right. So that's the business case like they come up with. And we provided the solution like, if you are as a company, then you have to register. We will provide you one code. That code will be shared with your employees. So as and when your employee try to register, they have to enter that code and automatically they will get some discount on whatever the bicycle or any accessories they are planning to have from your portal. So there are three things we have used here, like how we are allowing these employees to connect with power portals, because if you are allowing them to as an anonymous user, even your anonymous user, then those hits will be count and that will be kind of counted as a unit for the budgeting cycle we can say. So what I have suggested, like we can create one web application with the react and allowing them to register into the system. So we use the react web application for employee registration and once everything like registration and validation and authorization process completed, they will be coming as an active user into the portal. Right, but that user is associated with that company, the, whatever the employer they are working for, and now whenever they are trying to, like, purchase something, then that employee code will be automatically applied and they automatically get the discount and based on that, they are able to save like thousands of dollars per month in terms of trying to use different technologies and trying to fulfill the same requirement and allowing different customers to the same services.

Kirti Prajapati: 13:22
So that's one thing we have used for that. It's a combination of Model-D1 app and React web application and portal pages and the workflow. Instead of workflows, we have used the logic apps because of the highly secure structure where we are trying to use the API calls to the data bus. So we have used Azure logic apps and we have managed all the services security from the API management, from the Azure portal. So because it's very tightly integrated, so we didn't find any issues while connecting these different pieces all together and it went very well. And then still they are using the same product. It's almost two and a half years now.

Kirti Prajapati: 14:04
So that's one. And the second one is we are working with one of the government agencies where they are trying to allow those users different set of users to get those portfolio information from the portal and then they can get a project information and portfolio information and then get more details like how they they need some kind of information. Like few things are very confidential here, so I'm not going to talk about that, but yeah, this is the main focus, like how they are planning to pull that information from the portal. Either they might be the anonymous user or authenticated user from the portal and again, the users are around like 70,000, 80,000 for now, but gradually all those users must be increasing Like every quarter. We have a kind of set of rules like how many users new users activated into the system and, based on that, we are planning this performance tuning and everything related to the portal access.

Mark Smith: 15:36
Excellent. So one of my questions is and let's take the PubSec example why did they? You know there's choice. Every company has choice around software technology et cetera that they can use, and one of the biggest things that I find customers do is they want to de-risk the choices they make right. They want to make sure it's safe. Is it secure, is it governable? Will all our citizen data not leak out? When you think of those choices that agency would have had the choice of, for example, building this on SAP. They could have built it on Salesforce. They could have built it totally from scratch. Like you say, use React, build a full front-end. You know SQL, backend or whatever you know database technology they want to use there. They could have done on Pega right, servicenow any of these type of technologies out there would have done that. Why do you think they chose the Power Platform?

Kirti Prajapati: 16:37
So very interesting question, as I mentioned that for the first example where we have implemented the React and a combination of Model D1, apple, azure and Portals, so they already have that application into one of the open source technology. But the issue found when what happened? As a customer, I want to raise a request. So they have the system, but they have not any kind of integration tightly integration system where user has to submit something at one place and that will be available for all these responsible person from any platform. So that's why we suggested that this is fine, this is working as expected. But going forward, your number of user might be increasing and you might have more support tickets or other requests which may cause some issues with the how you are replying the services right, how frequently you are connecting with those all the users and supporting them right, and there is no automated system. Once the system, some request, is submitted by the user, then they don't have any kind of automated system where a set of people notify okay, this is coming into the system and we need to take care of this action right. So we have suggested that this would be the best option, though they are providing a lot of, or, we can say spending a lot of money on that, but we are still lacking some kind of integrations. Things like, as you mentioned, we are pulling out some bomb data from the SAP, like the product information data they are managing in SAP and they created custom development to pull those SAP data into their open source technology.

Kirti Prajapati: 18:22
So, in Power Platform, if you go with the Microsoft technology and we already have a lot of connectors available with the premium capacity, either you go with Workflow or go with Azure Logic Apps. Then we can use the same connectors in same range of cost, right, and that is also tightly integrated and highly secure, right. It could not be go like you can control your URLs and who can access those. So there are a number of points. We have suggested them and they agree that, okay, this is what we should have, but, whatever they have, they are happy with that.

Kirti Prajapati: 19:00
But we gradually started with the phase-wise right, just to give them confidence. Okay, this is the product you should look for, not the one you are using in current situation, because, going forward, the security might be the most critical point from your point of view, like customer thinking. That, then, how you can leverage or manage the cost or the licensing costs and budget for those projects. So that leads us a kind of good opportunity to introduce these new services and the Power Platform services and be implemented first as a POC that can be accessible by 5,000 to 10,000 users initially, and then they get the confidence okay, this is what we are looking out for, and then we roll out to the larger audience to allow them access.

Mark Smith: 19:52
Was there any hesitation by the customer about the choice of technology? You know, does any kind of? They asked you? You know more detailed questions. Was there any concern about um, the power platform, being the platform of choice?

Kirti Prajapati: 20:09
yes, as you know, that as a decision maker, there should not be one person from their side. It's a kind of collective decision. So there are a few like some. Yes, we are good to this technology and some people are asking more details, like you mentioned, like how we are going to manage these permissions and the security, like how we allow this, how we identify that this user is from the system or this is a relevant user or not, right, so we manage that all these permission metrics and everything into the system. Before we start anything, we provided the detailed document like how it should be and how the approach will be, so they have the actual picture, like we have not written any kind of like two, three paragraphs, but we provided the description as well as the diagram, because management people may or may not read the description, but they just visualize how the diagram will look like so they understand how the user will be interacting with the system and where they have to manage. All the security and other services can be connected from their different data sources like SAP or Business Central or Salesforce, whatever they have in the existing system, central or sales force, whatever they have into the existing system. So there are a lot of questions come into that.

Kirti Prajapati: 21:26
Introductory workshop sessions with different stakeholders and different department people, like sometimes it may happen that some people are not ready to digest the change. Right, if I'm using the excel, I am in my comfort zone. But if someone is asked you to use power vr tool, then that's a change for you. So it is very difficult to digest that change. But I have to like provide that confidence and the capability like how productive this will be for you so that gives a good confidence to those people that at least we can start with phase one and if that works then we can proceed further with a larger audience.

Kirti Prajapati: 22:04
So as a consultant, that is always my practice that I can give a good, transparent review from my side whether I'm doing that job or not. If you are coming with a question, then my job is to provide you the services the consulting services whether that works or not going forward. But I should give you a good advice from my point of view, like why you cannot save hundred dollars if it is possible by using different technologies, but comparing the hundred dollars, why you are spending thousand dollars to manage other stuff, right, yeah, like using this different development, pulling out that and connecting all the services, but by paying 500 you are getting everything. So eventually you are saving 500 per month, for an example. So that that way, uh, that helped me to give them confidence and they also realize okay, okay, this is what the system should be.

Mark Smith: 23:03
So tell me the outcomes, as in what's been the response from the customer of the solutions built in either of those cases, what's been the feedback in regards to the technology that's been implemented?

Kirti Prajapati: 23:21
Yeah, it's been quite wonderful for us because along with the development, we also try to implement the deployment process. So they do not have to hire a separate team or separate set of people who are managing this deployment process, because some of the customers may have three environments and some have the five environments. So, like how we are going to deploy those processes. So we try to optimize and automate each and every steps wherever applicable, so that gives a good feedback from the customers, apart from what we have developed for those users. Like users are also satisfied and they are very happy that, okay, we are accessing all the data required from anywhere, from any devices. That's the beauty of microsoft services. And then, uh, coming to that security point, like we have a kind of n number of regression testing, like how I can break the http request call from anywhere, like either I can hard code the url, press and try to open something, but we uh have a kind of lot of layers to authorize that user and to point to the data was stable or the entity and pull out the data. So that's highly secure product.

Kirti Prajapati: 24:35
They very much appreciated us. And in terms of uh for the management, like how management will look this application because they are not going to access it, they are not going to review the portal, they just need the numbers. So for them we provided the Power BI services reports and it's not kind of simple reports, it's kind of, you can say, whole inventory of the system, the portal. So only one report can give everything like from where customers are coming, who are our main customers, who are the employee of those customers and how many hits we are having each day. So that gives a good feedback like how the ecosystem we have used and provided this solution to the customer.

Mark Smith: 25:19
I like it. My final question to you, as we draw to a close, is to go back to something you said earlier, which you chose Logic Apps over Power Automate, and I know that that question in a lot of people's minds that maybe don't understand Logic Apps, and that Logic Apps and Power Automate are ultimately the same thing. They're just two sides of the one coin. One is designed for more logic apps, of course, as a more pro-code experience, perhaps more scale, and then you've got Power Automate, which allows more for a low-code development type of experience, and what I took from what you said is that you didn't need to make a low-code version available to your stakeholders, so you chose Logic Apps. Is that how you're thinking around it?

Kirti Prajapati: 26:05
Yes, as you just mentioned, that highly scalable right and we are building a product. We are not just building a portal for them, we are building a product. So we want to make sure that whatever information we are trying to allow external users to be accessed, that will be highly secure. So, logic App, have this connectivity to the API management into the Azure portal so we can create some groups and provide this access token and authorization and authentication mechanism over there. We can do the same thing with the Power Automate, but to leverage that control. We don't have that much of control in Power Automate, right, we can do the same thing with the Power Automate, but to leverage that control. We don't have that much of control in Power Automate. We can do the same functionality, but we have more control. And if the product is more scalable than what we envisioned in the beginning, then I would suggest that Logica would be the best option to go for. So we have the same connectors available in both the services, in Power Automate as well as the Logitech.

Mark Smith: 27:03
I like it. I like it, Karini. This has been a very interesting conversation. Thank you for coming on the show.

Kirti Prajapati: 27:10
Yeah, thanks Mike, thanks for having me and thanks Himanshu.

Mark Smith: 27:16
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 buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.