Game Design to Power Platform Expert and Revolutionizing Business Solutions with Jakub Marciniak

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're going to be focusing on lifting spreadsheet solutions to the power platform, something that, if you spend any amount of time in this space, you have had to do a lot of spreadsheet migration to the power platform. Today's guest is from Houston, texas in the United States. He's a principal consultant at Odesu Digital Hopefully I pronounced it right. He's passionate about enhancing fiscal discipline, application rationalization, optimization, automation and finding blue ocean in the innovation space. He teaches project management on a graduate level at Rice University in Houston. You can find links to his bio social media, particularly worth checking out his blog, so take a look there In the show notes for this episode, of course. Welcome to the show,Jakub.

Jakub Marciniak: 1:09
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Mark Smith: 1:11
Did I pronounce your company name right?

Jakub Marciniak: 1:13
It's Odysseus Digital. The idea at Incoperation was basically that we are taking our clients on a journey, and it's a long journey. You want to be a partner, right, you don't want to be like just a one-off thing, some small implementation or some small consulting that's how often things start but you want to develop into something bigger and therefore it is a journey, and the person who mastered that journey is Odysseus, historically and now that we are in the digital age, that was the idea to be a partner on the journey, as long as the client sees value in what we're doing, as long as we deliver or we are confident that we deliver that value to our clients.

Mark Smith: 1:55
I like it. Tell me a bit about food, family and fun. What do you do when you're not working, when you're not at your nine to five right that some people, as we just discussed off air, can get upset about, no, never having time for their own private life exactly so when I'm currently not working, it is.

Jakub Marciniak: 2:14
I am. I'm basically uh, well, I'm running my dog a lot. It's a pitbull labrador mix. Wow, yeah, and I got him from. I didn't know what I got into, because I'm I'm, uh, from germany. I grew up in Germany, I was born in Germany, but parents are Polish, therefore the name. But I run my dog a lot. I didn't know what I got him to me when I got this dog because I was like I wanted to, you know, take care of something, like I was living alone in apartments.

Jakub Marciniak: 2:40
I just received my green card here in the US, and then I got this little bunch of fur from the shelter and he grew into a huge, humongous dog that needs a lot of exercise, which is also very good for me, so I will not complain about that.

Mark Smith: 2:58
Nice, nice.

Jakub Marciniak: 2:59
Yeah, and apart from that, I like to play the guitar campfire level. I don't think I will get past that. I like to play the guitar Campfire level. I don't think I will get past that. I like that. Yeah, maybe at some point. I don't know, I try to do a lot of gamification and I try to be innovative in spaces that probably don't really match together. But you only get better by trying different things and I try to. Maybe at some point I will make like a power platform song or something. Right, sounds corny right now. Maybe it will be, we don't know, nice, but yeah, and maybe on TikTok, like just discussed, yeah, yeah, yeah, that might be a better platform.

Mark Smith: 3:38
Tell me about. How did you get into the Microsoft space? Why did your tech career go that way to the Microsoft space? Why did your tech career go that way.

Jakub Marciniak: 3:44
I started off pretty early, beginning 2000s, playing around with websites. I wanted to be a game designer originally. I played a lot of. In German we call it das schwarze Auge, the black eye, or was it the black eye or the dark eye, I've not heard of it. It's a role-playing game. It's a tabletop game. Okay, it's like Dun. It's a role-playing game. It's like a tabletop game. It's like Dungeons and Dragons right, it's a tabletop version, and I played it a lot as a kid. And then I thought, like you know world's up and how to do that. And somehow my dad got a computer back home which was like an x86 or 286 or going from there, and then I put my head together with a friend and he started like a little coding a little very simple, simple things. And then my mom was an opera singer Mezzo Alto, now retired.

Jakub Marciniak: 4:34
But you can imagine that back in times when it was really popular, like every individualist needed to have a good presence or wanted to have a good presence online, which was difficult to do. I mean today, today you have two clicks, like a website builder, and you know that's, it's done, and it chooses colors for you, you do ai and you know, if you have good pictures of yourself done right, and maybe some hearing, um, like some samples from operas that you sang or whatever. But back in times it was, we did admit, with macromedia, flash, yes, which was really difficult to. Uh, you know all the the key frames very detailed. And then you wanted to do something out of bounds. You need to start coding. And other people started like, yeah, you know, maybe, well, she has a website, I want a website too. Because there was another solo artist like a bass voice, and others started like hitting her up as, oh, you have this great breath presence, can you do something like this? And then she suggested guys, maybe you want to take a little money for it, right? And so we started doing that.

Jakub Marciniak: 5:34
Eventually I ended up studying sociology because I felt being too much stuck to the computer is Well, I mean. I felt I wanted to be like I want to do something with people, also, right. So I felt this empathic side was for me, maybe a little underdeveloped and so I I felt it's the right way to go to do something in this realm. So as a minor, I took media and communication science and german public law and after I graduated, like a neighbor of my parents hit me up. It's like well, you will finish your sociology degree in like four months. What are you going to do then? And I'm like, well, I don't know driving taxi. And so he's like, how about like SharePoint? I heard you're doing computers and I didn't know what SharePoint was.

Jakub Marciniak: 6:18
I did like lots of like you know, starting with JavaScript, HTML Flash, which was big then and it was already dying back like I think, 2007,. It was already dying slowly, but yeah, and then he hit me up. He got me into telecom training for like a rollout of a SharePoint website. They rolled out new conference equipment, telephone equipment, yeah, and so he got me into this gig as a project coordinator. A little bit Sharepoint here, a little bit chairpoint there, and so I became more technical, more technical.

Jakub Marciniak: 6:50
Another company got a year later to me. It's like well, it sounds like you might be a fit for this consulting company here, which got me deeper into infrastructure and more into infrastructure. Then at some point I think 2010, 2011, there was a height of knowledge management, all things that getting all the knowledge bases together from all the company and putting it in some kind of SharePoint structure with intranet and team sites and then all connected through an index or a search was big, and so I switched between infrastructure and that and, yeah, that was my journey into Microsoft. From there, I had like a little bigger clients deutsche bank, merck for zenius and in 2013 I decided you know what I just wanted.

Jakub Marciniak: 7:33
Like, my parents have this, like, I think, this expat gene where they came from poland to germany and I felt well, maybe I should go somewhere else, and so I applied for an MBA, which I then did in Thunderbirds Growth Management in Arizona. I was first hoping for finding more strategic work, more and more financially oriented, more strategic, which I now understand comes probably it's more convenient out of a position that you deep into one topic. You can look at any type of organization from a specific angle, right, and some people come from the financial perspective and maybe they will be like some kind of finance, and some people look at the company from a marketing perspective or a sales perspective or an operational perspective and I'm coming from a technical perspective now just because of the experience, which makes, it over time, easier to see certain discrepancies to what people want and what people have currently right, and so that just comes over time. It's not like I think I dreamt up that after I finished my MBA, I get directly sponsored, like you know what the grad schools tell you, like you're the creme de la creme, you're the greatest person ever, and now you go and conquer the world and you deserve this, whatever.

Jakub Marciniak: 8:50
And I ended up doing a lot of project online implementations. I started at some point with the Power Platform, which I understand now is a much bigger field than you know at the beginning, just like taking requirements, looking at the different modules, configuring, you know, getting training, documenting and going, and over the years, I added Power BI to the mix, power Automate to the mix and, of course, then Power Apps. Yes, and then I founded Odysseus Digital in 2019. And now I'm living in a network of partners and can have actually like the advantage of being able to execute scalable engagements at clients of all sizes.

Mark Smith: 9:34
Nice. Such an interesting journey. You mentioned to me when we had a prequel around lifting spreadsheet solutions to the Power Platform. Can you tell us about that?

Jakub Marciniak: 9:43
Yeah. So it's always interesting that you go especially here, right? If you have large companies like 10,000 people, 15,000 people, more, more like that, then you have a big body of people sitting at headquarters, right? So, for example, in oil and gas or in energy, there's a headquarter, and then there are oil rigs or there are refineries. Those are the assets or those are the sites, right, and they need to be, and this is where basically the money is made. This is where everything is done, and in headquarters you control those assets. But as the company grows, you add layers of management over layers of management, right, which is normal because you need to have, like you know, you cannot control 2,000 people in a flat hierarchy. So, you know, you just spread out and make it more detailed.

Jakub Marciniak: 10:29
Now the problem becomes people start collaborating with each other, which is not a problem per se. It's great, right, but Teams is made for that, or Skype was made for that and all these other products that Microsoft has, and also some competitors. But eventually everything revolves around financials, some kind of financials or some kind of data that is supposed to be structured. The interpretation of the data basically needs to be structured right, otherwise it's a bunch of fluff. You will not get to your strategy if you cannot translate it into percentage or into, then even from percentage, into dollars. And in order to do that most efficiently, people use databases. Right, right, usually they use databases, but now in large companies, they spread out so many different exceptions right, because the businesses or service, the lines of business, right product lines and the service lines might differ so much that they, despite the one singular goal that they all roll out to each other, they create their own silos and within their silos they start collaborating only with each other. Or, if they start collaborating with others, they go from structured data, they put structured data in a semi-structured format, right, which is Excel.

Jakub Marciniak: 11:46
And there are, of course, multiple issues with Excel as a collaboration tool. I can tell you first, before I start criticizing Excel, I know it is a great tool. If you're in finance, it's a great tool, and also not only in finance, obviously. I have a friend who's a professor for water management and he has highly complex algorithms running in Excel, running simulations in Excel, and he shares it with his technical assistants, other professors. This is very, very highly skilled and the interpretation needs to be open to everyone, so he needs to give them the source data to validate his models. Now, this is a very complex process which probably doesn't work otherwise than if you have the freedom to create whatever you want on a spreadsheet.

Jakub Marciniak: 12:35
But what happens most of the time is you have some kind of periods, so you have like January through December and probably 10 more years, and you want to calculate something, be it total cost of ownership, be it revenue, be it some KPI, that you want to see how it behaves over time for your projects, for resource costs, for anything right, and on a daily basis. People do that also as engineers, and they put in like pressures of cokers or of fractionators or of something right. They put those different measures in a table and this by itself is not a problem. But what they do, they cannot secure it. It's physically impossible to secure an Excel properly. You can only access it or you cannot access it. And, yes, you can have a password, but the password is true. You have one password for the whole Excel file.

Jakub Marciniak: 13:27
So, because you have no row-level security and you have no column security, you will not be able to trust if you share it with more than like well, let's say two or three people, right, because sure you have an audit trail and you can say, like, well, all the changes are tracked, but what effectively happens like?

Jakub Marciniak: 13:42
Have you ever looked at an audit trail of an excel file where 20 people put in their forecast month over month for I don't know 50 projects? It's not feasible, right? And yet, because there are so many exceptions, oftentimes there's a very long way to realize that the validation of the data takes a lot of time, right? If you say we close the books at the end of the month or at the first of the month, it will take like two more weeks to clean everything up, to make sure that splits are made, to make sure that the data is trustworthy, because you have source systems like Oracle, sap, adp, some payrolls, whatever you have. You have all those systems flowing in into the spreadsheet or like pulling reports with those spreadsheets, and what actually happens is there's a certain amount of resources. If you just translate it into a blended rate of X dollars per hour, like $100, $150 per hour, right, and you imagine that there are like five or six people sitting over it and grabbing those pieces together, cleaning up the data month over month, that is a tremendous amount of work to validate the data and to make it trustworthy, and so my idea, of course, is to get rid of this, because we know we have low-code platforms today and Microsoft has one of the best low-code I would think the best low-code platform within the market.

Jakub Marciniak: 15:03
It's secure to the degree that you can secure a low-code platform. Of course, there are limitations, but for something that came from zero security, right From really zero security, that's a huge improvement. You can show in Power Apps right In Canvas Apps. You can show things like you show in Excel, but in the background you can basically design whatever you need to design so that it grows in rows and not in columns, and this will make it efficient. This will make it much more clean. You can secure the rows, you can secure the columns, you can well the sky's the limit right and all the processes that you put over, all the approval processes that you put over, can go up to readership and really don't necessarily create that bottleneck as waiting five days for finance and procurement and accounting to see how we can mend those gaps that we discover every month.

Mark Smith: 15:58
You're so right and you've obviously got a lot of insight into Excel and the challenges when many people are involved in the data, and I think that clarity was important. How do you, when you go into an organization and you need to assess you know I talked in your bio about Blue Ocean and where innovation can be uncovered and developed inside the organization how do you assess a business unit? Do you have a model for doing this and understanding this?

Jakub Marciniak: 16:57
I have a certain way of thinking that I try to simplify as far as possible because you understand, you look at those, like you know, those Kraken, octopus organizations, where it just gets more complex and more exceptions the farther down you go. But yeah, I believe that there are very key elements that you have the operating model, which consists of basically the strategy and the hierarchy and the vision and the mission right, which all usually come in a bundle, and the operating model is typically aligned. When I talk about operating model, I mean basically the hierarchy of the organization is aligned with the vision and mission. That's probably the easiest to do. It sounds like a lift, but if you look at the top, from a leadership level, you can make that lift pretty easily. Then you have a bunch of capabilities, as many people as you have right with your partners and your vendors. You have those capabilities in your organization and this is probably where it stands and it's false, right? The success of your organization is basically the sum of capabilities. So you want to increase the digital fluency and you want to increase the, the degree of automation and optimization and and the mindset of thinking about those things inside your resources, right inside your human resources inside, everything that can be creative in some way, and you want to free them as much as you can from any operational work. And you can, of course you can augment your capabilities by just buying in more. You can augment. You can say I want to have now this vendor, I want to have now Salesforce and I want to have now Oracle inside. I want to have everything out of one hand, so I just go directly to Accenture or something, right.

Jakub Marciniak: 18:42
But then of course, you make yourself, first of all, you make yourself highly dependent on similar big vendors, of course, which in some cases there is no other way, just because they provide too many services to look outside of that, right. But in other cases you're looking for very specialized people, right. And you always need to be very careful because you increase your capabilities. That means you hire more people or you put more money into like contracts, msps or some software that you develop or something that you deploy or implement, and at the same time you increase your cost. And the only time that you decrease your cost is when you basically say, like we have now a better view of everything, like you have better insights, you have better reports and at the same time, our processes become more automated because we act on that transparency that we have right now. But eventually, everything that rolls up to capabilities is the source. Right, because you're only as strong as your weakest link. Right, because you're only as strong as your weakest link. Right.

Jakub Marciniak: 19:39
If you have people that are not very digitally fluent and they tend to have a lot of power, which sometimes happens again, it can be fine because you can have very empathetic leaders that understand their own gaps and can assess that properly.

Jakub Marciniak: 19:53
I'm not saying that technical aptitude or excellence is the only way to go, but it is definitely easier the way that I observe it if you have a lot of digital talent sitting around that is able to communicate very efficiently about issues that they see. Right, if someone calls me and be like well, I don't know, like the screen went blank, right, it's like you seem to be a guy for this because you're in IT, I'm like oh, I also believe that there's a factor in time. Right, we're like I perfectly understand it. If it was 15 years ago today, I would probably expect a little higher level of minimum digital fluency. Yeah, um, that's where I try to educate and and work this piece that, oh, I don't know. I don't know most of the things, but I will eventually get there, and if I can explain it to someone, then that's even a win-win.

Mark Smith: 20:46
So if I had to summarize what you were saying there, when you go into an organization you're looking at kind of a matrix of those four specific areas. So, starting with their operating model, their strategy, the execution of that, and the top left hand of the quadrant, the right hand you're looking at innovation. So therefore, what are the capabilities, et cetera, that they have? So that's that top part of the matrix, and then the bottom is the operations, which is process and insights, and so are you looking at those as kind of like four levers that you have the ability that if you made changes in those quadrants, it then either drives more value for an organization or potentially reduces cost for an organization. How do you think of it in that context?

Jakub Marciniak: 21:34
Yeah, well, in that context, I think that innovation will, over time, become more important than automation and optimization. Yes, we are approaching a level of the world where most of the things are standardized, implementations become a commodity, right, or become commoditized, but, at the same time, to get that aspect of innovation, you need to be able to, to align this operating model with the, with those processes that that lead to people can think freely. Right, you want to have this human element of like what can we do next? Right, instead of like, oh, I'm so busy I don't know where the time went. Yeah, right, yeah. And as long as you have this type of organization, and also, what another factor is, like, the freedom of thinking, right? I believe that if you give people the freedom to think about their own career, their own possibilities within an organization, especially large organizations that have great career paths for people that are willing to do something in their own career development or are self-driven, then this will always have better results than, like you know, coming from the outside. Right?

Jakub Marciniak: 22:45
And I'm saying that as a consultant myself, but I'm seeing that you can work better with people that are self-motivated right, then with people that are basically trying to keep their job together, especially in times where larger companies run programs right, where it is very clear that cost cutting is preliminary or is primary, and we all know that human resources are the highest cost, which makes it so much more uncomfortable these days. And I don't remember that being that way when I started consulting, but also I started in Germany, so that might also just be a different feeling there altogether.

Mark Smith: 23:21
Yeah, interesting, interesting.

Mark Smith: 23:24
If you want to drill into this a bit more, you'll see in the show notes a post called Cost Value Matrix, and it's well worth looking at if you're in the space to really understand it and see where innovation can come from inside the organization.

Mark Smith: 23:40
I noticed in your post a lot of tools that I like which is from the strategizer the business model canvas and value matrix, et cetera. Very, very cool ways of representing information, and I love then the roll through to reporting and the insights that you can drive inside an organization. It even makes me feel like, hey, I need to go away and actually, in my own business, do a lot more around the insights that I know exist, but I don't have them in a format that I can consume to take action on. Tell me about strategic portfolio management what are your thoughts around that and how do you, I suppose, talk about strategic portfolio management? What are your thoughts around that and how do you, I suppose, talk about strategic portfolio management differently than than, perhaps, project management and I know there's quite a difference, but often there's a relationship between those things. How do you think about it?

Jakub Marciniak: 24:34
oh, yeah, generally speaking, portfolio management is doing the right things and project management is doing the things. Right, yes, or the right way. Yeah, I'm thinking, well, like there's. There's often there's some kind of disconnect, right, the larger, the larger the organization, the easier it is to find any disconnect between strategy that is formulated and is supposed to be achieved and can somehow be formulated in numbers, and the execution. Right, and that's because there is a long delay, right? So if we're at the beginning of the year and we define some kind of strategy or redefine the strategy because there's a crisis like COVID, and then we only at the beginning of the year and we define some kind of strategy or redefine the strategy because there's a crisis like COVID, and then we only see the effect six to 12 months later of what we discussed, right, because there's a very small layer of people that discusses this and determines what the strategy is, but a very huge layer of people that needs to understand the same thing.

Jakub Marciniak: 25:24
And I'm thinking about it more in terms of again, it's a very educational field because it's only about communication, right, if you have people that understand how the strategy helped them achieve their own goals, then of course it is more likely to succeed right, because it trickles down to the people that basically execute the strategy and people that take accountability for the capital dollars that they're spending or the expense dollars that they're spending. Of course, this accountability is somewhat given within the hierarchy, but oftentimes you find sometimes that, well, currently I have a client where I see the most successful BAs or the most well-driven areas of that client are the ones where you have the business analysts that are very passionate about what they're doing.

Jakub Marciniak: 26:17
Or at least our passionate is like maybe some are, for sure, passionate, but they are very, very good at what they're doing and they don't do that because they get told to do, but they do that because they can assess. They assess the situation across the functions. They don't only look at their own space, they look across the functions, and so this makes it so much more easier to develop a good sense of what is worth doing. And if that is heard on the top, the strategy or strategic portfolio management, project portfolios then can adapt right. And this is only when you tap into an organization and you really get to know the program managers, maybe some of the leadership. Of course you will never get to all of them, but there is a specific layer where you just can drive the value from the middle.

Jakub Marciniak: 27:08
But also that people are heard when they say like, hey, this is not working, this is a process that got cut, this is something that we're not supposed to do anymore, but I feel I need that. And then it's the questions it's just this area an exception, or is it something that was just a victim of, like a rationalization initiative, right, which happens a lot? So these are those things where it's a reciprocal. I would say it's reciprocity right, so you can look at it from the top down and from the down bottom. But you need to always, you cannot just ignore, right, the certain voices, right.

Mark Smith: 27:48
So typically in the work that you get called in to do, is what, as in, do you go in and really sort out strategy inside an organization or do you look more at the you know the people part of it and where you talked about that digital fluency or literacy needing to come up a level, putting programs in place around, how do you increase that? I thought what was very interesting in your post is that if people's literacy was increased and you brought a level of automation around your processes, it then creates naturally an environment for innovation.

Jakub Marciniak: 28:24
First, I'm a systems integrator, so I'm doing dynamics. I did dynamics implementations, multiple for field services, for sales, one in a nonprofit. I did a lot of project for the web project online the old one and now the new one implementations. So this is structuring project portfolio governance, I would say, while implementing the system is my specialty.

Jakub Marciniak: 28:50
I don't want to sell software, but I would also not implement salesforce right. I would only do microsoft products right because it is so convenient and the time to the time to achieve something to have tangible results in an environment that people like or that people are familiar with is very short right. To get a PLC up or an MVP is very short right. It's all integrated with Active Directory or Azure Active Directory, so it comes all in one hand. There's multiple connectors that you can use. I mean there's nothing more convenient that I can do with as few resources as possible, because you can go to, if you have large volume contracts, what ends up happening. Of course, they will save you money at some point right and over the year of like three or five years, but the price tag is pretty heavy and you can achieve many of those things if you elevate your own resources right or if you enable your own resources, you know, to basically help with that implementation.

Jakub Marciniak: 29:50
And that's where I'm coming into it. Well, we could look at the governance of a portfolio. And how do you do your long-range planning? Who should approve certain budgets? How do you get into the planning stage? What do you need to justify to get a project off the ground? But also, what are the differences in the groups? There's no one-size-fits-all, but the beauty of those Microsoft products, especially in the project or just the naked power platform when you take it, is that you create any workflow and any flow, any business process flow, with very simple approvals and with an immense amount of efficiency in any organization. And that's something that just came up the last seven, eight years.

Mark Smith: 30:45
Jakub, it's been so good having you on the show. I've learned so much from you. As I said before, I recommend people go check out Jakub. It's been so good having you on the show. I've learned so much from you. As I said before, I recommend people go check out Jakub's blog because there's some really deep insight that applies to everybody. Really that works in the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 space. Thanks, Jakub, thank you. 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.