Redefining IT Projects: From Traditional Contracts to Agile Collaboration and Cloud-Based Innovations

Mark Smith: 0:00
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. Welcome back, everybody. We are on air for another episode brought to you by Cloud Lighthouse. Of course, always new announcements happening as our business grows in the market. I take it you'll be listening to this. Well, probably, I'm guessing we will be at Dynamics Minds and we'll be recording additional episodes at that point. But it's exciting times. The world's changing. You know. Large language models are coming out just about every single day. We're getting new ones. They're getting more intelligent. We can do more with them. But today we're going to talk about why the IT project is dead and why it's one of my favorite lines. Right, why something else?

Andrew Welch: 0:59
is dead. Why is it dead, Mark? I think you need to give some context on that.

Mark Smith: 1:04
And what's replacing it. But with that, Anna, I'm going to throw to you to really kick us off today. Thanks.

Ana Welch: 1:09
Hi everyone. I'm really glad to be back. I feel like I haven't been on one episode. Yeah, it's been a while for me. Thanks for still having me back.

Andrew Welch: 1:19
You left Mark and I alone with Will.

Ana Welch: 1:24
Not on purpose. I would never do that. I would never, ever do that, because poor Will, well played. Today we're going to talk about IT projects and everyone's like what? Like? That's our bread and butter. The way you know where we come from with um, this subject is how ip projects are actually set up. You know, uh, how does a customer build an ip project? How does a partner build an ip project?

Andrew Welch: 1:58
oh my god for those of you who will not see this in the final cut, chris's screen just froze, with him drinking a margarita.

Mark Smith: 2:05
That's very jealous um, actually that's a good opportunity if you're listening to this podcast. Right, just the audio. Remember, the podcast is always done with video, so you know you can check it out on youtube. There's a playlist for the uh ecosystem and you can watch us and not just listen to us.

Ana Welch: 2:28
So yeah, just to finish off, what we mean by the IT project is dead. We mean the traditional IT project where you would go, you know, as a partner, and you would bid for a contract and you would go and pretend because frankly that was always the case that you're going to work for about 12 months to 18 months on a project and then the customer is going to take it over, and then you're going to go on and work on other projects and everything will be just like milk and honey, and everything will be just like milk and honey. You'll just have like a managed services team to keep the lights on. Everything was very good In theory. It was never like this, but that's what we thought, or relied for ourselves that it would be. Yeah, so this was about the ID project. What do you think, chris, with your margarita Hold?

Andrew Welch: 3:27
on. I think we should say that, Chris, by the time we are finished with this today, Chris will probably have been recording podcasts for three straight hours. And what time is it? It's almost 10 o'clock at night in the United Kingdom.

Chris Huntingford: 3:42
Yeah, I started a long time ago night in the United Kingdom. I started a long time ago.

Ana Welch: 3:46
And he probably did a full day of work and woke up at 5am to go to the gym.

Chris Huntingford: 3:51
I need to tell you guys the greatest story before I talk about IT projects. Today I woke up and I have to come to Manchester for Government Day tomorrow. I don't know what Government Day is, but it's a thing. There's an acronym that goes with it. It's like local partner, fantastic, awesome, people of network, whatever, anyway.

Andrew Welch: 4:11
Are the robot toasters coming.

Ana Welch: 4:12
I feel like I should be there, Chris.

Chris Huntingford: 4:14
You want to come to government day, I'll send you an invite. I would have loved to. Yeah, I got my bags ready last night. I packed my stuff. I'm like sweet, I'm ready for government day. Then what I did is I rushed out because I was on a call to Amy, one of our PMs, and I got on the train and I'm like sick, I'm ready to rock and roll, I'm going to do some email. Guess what I left behind.

Mark Smith: 4:33
Your computer.

Chris Huntingford: 4:34
I left my laptop behind. I'm on a rental. I'm literally like hanging out I remember my charger.

Mark Smith: 4:41
How do you forget something like that?

Andrew Welch: 4:43
Yeah, I cannot even imagine. That is the stuff of nightmares. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Huntingford: 4:47
So the last conference I left my charger behind. This time I left my laptop behind, but I have my charger for all the laptops I can't charge. So we're in a good place, we're in a great place.

Mark Smith: 4:58
What do we think about the concept of borrowing a laptop?

Chris Huntingford: 5:01
No. So I went back to ANS and I'm like ANS people, my polar bear, ate my laptop, can I have a new one? And they're like, yeah, so now I have a rental laptop from them.

Ana Welch: 5:11
Yeah, but how do you feel about it, about borrowing a laptop? It's kind of like that's not yours.

Andrew Welch: 5:19
What other grubby fingers have been on that trackpad?

Chris Huntingford: 5:22
Well, the thing is, what I can tell you now is that all the vowel keys work, which is cool. Because my laptop none of the vowel keys work, because I'm so brutal on them, so because I type so hard, right, so a I don't even know what to think yeah, yeah, this is, this is.

Andrew Welch: 5:36
This is chris types the way he talks. Yeah, I do right, in vowels, in vowels. So Chris was the guy who, I believe one year at a conference this was at the after party and by the end of the night you were talking only in vowels.

Chris Huntingford: 5:54
It's underwater Swahili, bro, it's how I normally talk. So back on to projects. That's a great question, anna. Um, first of all, hire a project manager who can look after their laptop.

Andrew Welch: 6:10
Um, what I've learned is can you imagine chris is a project manager?

Ana Welch: 6:14
oh my god I think he would be an awesome project manager. I'm here to tell you I worked with chris and chris I'm here to tell you organized I. I know he doesn't look like he is, but he never misses a deadline that's right or anything? He remembers everything to be fair.

Chris Huntingford: 6:34
I do, that's correct. Thank you, adam. I wanted to carry on swirling. Listen, I've been on podcasts and I've been on for like four hours. So I think, from a project point of view, like we've had to de-educate people on actually what a project is, because they have this thing in their head. They're like, okay, we're going to take a thing and we're going to make it into another thing, and then when we're done, we're done right, and these are our deliverables, and we have deliverables, and then we're awesome and even the frameworks are designed for like these hardcore deliverables and things that you make. But the thing that makes me laugh so much, right, is that when you look at tools that we're using now, the tech is moving so fast. Your deliverable can't be delivered by the same thing that you decided to deliver in the first place, right?

Ana Welch: 7:26
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Chris Huntingford: 7:28
So how is that possible? Like you can't, it doesn't work right. So the whole idea is that you have to be able to move. I feel like a project is more of a. It's like water it's got to be a fluid thing, right?

Ana Welch: 7:38
So Mark is right, the project really really is that.

Andrew Welch: 7:42
Yeah, I think so. So I think that we need to make the distinction here right, in that there are still a lot I just can't with Chris at this drink. So my distinction is that there are still a lot of consultancies out there delivering using an outdated project-based model and there are still a lot of customers that are out there trying to buy IT projects right. So we're talking about, we're almost talking in the future and saying the IT project is dead. Right now, I think that the IT project, the traditional IT project, is largely dead, but most people don't yet realize it and loads of consultancies and customers are trying very desperately to cling to this very, I think, fundamentally outdated way of doing business. And since you all have given me an opening by not talking over me, I'm going to continue with my thesis on this right.

Andrew Welch: 8:41
So, mark, you know we've gotten to a point on the podcast where we either just and, by the way, it's not a podcast anymore, mark, I hear it's a show.

Ana Welch: 8:50
It's a show and I need to, andrew, I need to. I need to confess the fact that I did get an email about our dinner reservation tomorrow night, so I was looking through that and mapping us, so that's why I kind of didn't interrupt you. I'm sorry.

Andrew Welch: 9:05
Nice. So it is my birthday tomorrow and Anna is taking me out to, I think, a very fancy place, and I do like fancy dinner.

Mark Smith: 9:14
You seem to have had a birthday for the entire month. I've seen so many messages about your birthday, your birthday, this, your birthday, that I'm just like my gosh. This is amazing.

Chris Huntingford: 9:24
It's his birthday. Year mark, he celebrates his birthday. Yeah, wake us up with the first always the case.

Ana Welch: 9:30
Oh, you know, every ever, ever since andrew's got, andrew had his midlife crisis. He started um appreciating his birthday. So now we like we're on full-on party, we're gonna go to dinner tomorrow and then I'm sure we're gonna party with you guys next week at dynamics minds actually and I'm I'm touched by this for the second year in a row, the people at um doc centric are planning a blowout birthday party for me it's just so amazing. And that cake was the best cake ever last year it was oh, that cake was so good.

Andrew Welch: 10:38
What's cake? I can't recover from that.

Ana Welch: 10:49
Okay, the project. I'm just so sorry that I wasn't paying attention before when you, when you said your your stuff, which I'm sure was very clever.

Andrew Welch: 10:58
It was. It was quite clever. Thank you, thank you. So. So my my thesis on this right is that there's the reason that the traditional IT project is dying and we can get into well, what is it going to become. But there are some overlapping forces here. One of them is that the cloud has, over the last decade or so, just fundamentally changed the nature of what managed services are. Right, like, of what happens after the project, happens after the project. It used to be that you could have a booming business of patching and upgrading and turning dials and making sure all the blinky lights were blinking in the right way, and that's just not what managed services is becoming.

Andrew Welch: 11:43
And I hear a lot of people out there that are they're almost asking the wrong question about managed services. They're saying, they're saying how can I take my managed services practice and make it effective in the years to come, whereas I think the right question is well, maybe this, this notion of you have the people who do the projects and you have the people who do the managed services Maybe that's what needs to be thrown out, right? So I think that there's that managed services force, right? So I think that there's that managed services force. I think that there is. You know what Chris and I have geeked out about for years. Give it to the team that does app dev, or the team that does data engineering, or the team that does RPA, or the team that does whatever, whatever, whatever. But the nature of the technology itself is becoming much more so that all of these technologies overlap and they need one another. You can't just have an app project, you cannot just have a data project.

Ana Welch: 12:54
I want to just say that the DevOps Institute actually started saying that you know, managed services teams are no more and you need a mix of those skills in like 2008 or no sorry 2018 or 2019. And this is what they were teaching people at the time. But no one was really listening, because devop sounds very technical and boring, doesn't it? I guess I remembered all of that, um, because I've been to India two weeks ago. Thank you, Clever Digital, for sending me to India.

Andrew Welch: 13:33
It was a brilliant trip. Anna loved the food.

Ana Welch: 13:35
Shut up. I did struggle with the food a little bit. Wow, did you really? I did, I did, I just couldn't. Did it spice you up? Yeah, my tummy couldn't get it to a point where, you know, my team was there and everyone like wanted to be so helpful. So there was this colleague of mine who would yell from our restaurant table, no matter where we were to be, like get her something bland. So that was great. But anyway, you know this india team. They, um, you know this India team. They, you know they started small.

Ana Welch: 14:13
Together with the rest of our organization that used to be called CloudThing would do a continuous improvement plan which would be sort of like a managed services plan, keeping the lights on. All of the blinky lights would blink in a certain way, exactly like Andrew described. You know, I was talking to someone there, someone pretty high up, very, very smart guy, and he was like look, I've been trying to tell you guys, we grew and technology evolved. We need to change the nature of how we do things. You know contracts should be different and you know, obviously the newer contracts are different and we're working in a different way. It kind of hit home with what I knew from the DevOps Institute with how teams should be built and how we estimate for things. And, exactly like you're saying, you know there's no more managed services. How do we revolutionize this so that it works?

Andrew Welch: 15:28
Well and I think, anna, to your point right, these are things that say the DevOps Institute have been talking about for some time. What I think was potentially missing from that equation back in, you know, I think you said 2018 when they first started talking about this what was missing from that equation then may very well have been the economic imperative, right? So this condition with managed the cloud is not new, right? This transition out of the old managed services model has been underway for some time. The same goes for the difference, you know, for the convergence of tech, where you can't just have an app project or a data project, etc. But I think that the ingredient that is not today, when we're recording on the 20th of May 2024, not everyone has felt this yet, but people are going to feel this in the next 12 to 24 months in a big way, and that is that the nature of these projects and what has driven these projects has been this focus on monolithic core business systems.

Andrew Welch: 16:39
I'm going to install or upgrade my ERP or my CRM or my HR information system or whatever your core business system of choice might be, and for a very long time, we had a very you know, consultancies had a very cyclical, stable business model where every five to seven years, their customers were going to need to undertake a big project to upgrade.

Andrew Welch: 17:04
And what we are now at is we're on the downward slope, where most of these core business systems have been moved to the cloud in some form of a PAS or SAS architecture, where the upgrades or the updates to these systems are being pushed on a fairly incremental but regular basis. So partners around the world, consultancies around the world, are about to see this historic stream of cyclical revenue vanish and that, I think, might be the economic imperative that pushes them over the edge to seek new business models, though unfortunately, I don't think enough of them are going to figure this out. I think they're going to try very, very desperately to cling to this old-fashioned model of project-based work, because that's their bread and butter, and they're going to have a huge innovators dilemma and I think we're going to see some partners a lot of partners actually in the coming years really, really start to fail.

Chris Huntingford: 18:04
Yeah, we called this, though this has been a long time in the making. I mean, we said the same thing about niche little apps.

Andrew Welch: 18:17
It's like oh, in the beginning we'll have, we'll have bob and bob and mary make some niche at cannabis apps for some people. And then craplet it's called chris, it's called a craplet and and her name was sally from hr and all of a sudden craplets go.

Chris Huntingford: 18:26
It's the same thing with like these, these upgrades right like oh no oh no we'll make all our earth money from doing upgrades, and and he's and this junk, and now it's going away. The thing that bothers me, though, is that, like it's not as if people haven't been warned, though, like we've said to people dudes, sort your shit out, go and learn about enablement, go and learn about driving governance, go and learn about driving security. Think about the wider data platform.

Ana Welch: 18:51
Wait, you mean customers. We told customers to do that.

Chris Huntingford: 18:54
No partners, we told partners, we told partners. Anna, you and me told partners to do that.

Ana Welch: 18:59
I know, I know what a great team hey.

Chris Huntingford: 19:02
Yeah, we have a slide. Do you remember making a slide at Microsoft where it was that horrible green color but I had at the top run?

Chris Huntingford: 19:10
I'm like advisory Advisory is your thing you need to do here to help people understand their wider ecosystem and they were like, oh, what is this thing? That makes no sense. And even the partner I'm with now we're trying to drive advisory and they're kind of getting it, but it's hard right, because it doesn't have a tangible outcome every time. It's not like oh look, I have a thing to put a lemon and lime juice in. It's way bigger than that and that's what you call a wicked problem. And actually, if you listen to what Paul Cumsey talks about Paul's great right, I love his books and stuff but he talks about actually people are so fixated on solving the simple problem because they understand the defined outcome right, whereas actually what we're trying to solve is a wicked problem which is systemic, with a lot of way more wicked problems underneath, and that's hard right, and people don't want to accept the fact that it's there.

Andrew Welch: 19:59
Well, and what's happening part of why this is a wicked problem is because it is the status quo at present is maintained by the bad behavior of both the customer and the provider of service, right?

Andrew Welch: 20:19
So on the provider of service side, on the partner side, you have these organizations many of them at this point who are owned by private equity or some other, you know some other kind of growth centric investment model Right, have this, this imperative to not implode their traditional revenue stream, right? So I see on the partner side a lot of resistance to trying these new business models and moving away from the cash cow that was the project-based model, and to this point, it's actually suited these partners quite well. Because on the customer side, you have a way of budgeting within IT departments that, like I said earlier, basically says I have a basket of requirements, I am going to tie it to a line item of budget and I'm going to go out to the market and ask for people who can meet these requirements for me and be done with it. But I just I think that this strange arrangement that weirdly keeps partners in the past and costs customers way more than it should, we got to be close to a shatter point here, right, guys?

Ana Welch: 21:32
got to be. We got to be close to a shatter point here, right guys? I don't think that it keeps uh partners in the past. I feel like people can just not move as as fast like they need the cash, the cash cow. They're not all cloud lighthouse or brand new and like cloud.

Andrew Welch: 21:48
Lighthouse is not an implementation partner, just to be clear. Lighthouse is not an implementation partner, just to be clear.

Ana Welch: 21:51
Exactly right. So for an implementation partner. How do you do that from an implementation partner perspective?

Andrew Welch: 21:59
Well, let's ask the question. So what's next? If we agree and it sounds like we do that the old way of working is not the future way of working? What replaces it, guys?

Mark Smith: 22:13
so one thing I've noticed is that customers are much more mature nowadays than in the past, when they used to. I know, chris, we'll debate this in a second. What I mean by mature is that, you know, my 20 years have been in the space. In the early days when you would go in and you'd present to a customer the concept of dynamics. Back then they these are comments that I remember getting I thought microsoft only did the operating system, windows isn't that theirs? Do they only do service like what is this? Like? We didn't. And so you always, always, uh, you had to explain what the technology could do and how it could enable. Now a customer doesn't come to market and go. What is this dynamics thing? It's an established product in market. They've probably got a couple of people on their team that have been involved in those type of projects in the past. What I am noticing is that in the past a customer would have a much greater degree of dependency on their implementation partner because they didn't know they hadn't implemented technology like this.

Mark Smith: 23:19
Now you're dealing with a market that is implemented and I'm not saying that particular company, but they've got staff on board that have been involved in these projects in the past. They've got an opinion. They've got an opinion about dynamics and its various workloads. They've got an opinion even about power platform. And the one I find funny about the Power Platform it's the whole elephant analogy. Right, one's holding the tail and go I know what the Power Platform does. Someone else holding the trunk and going no, it does this right. There's a massive amount of confusion on the concept of the Power Platform. I even noticed this in Microsoft. Microsoft staff, you know, will go. I only this in microsoft. Microsoft staff, you know, will go. I only sell dynamics, I don't sell the power platform. And you're just like I don't think you understand how this all works because it is the power platform you know. But I'm noticing that that customers are going. You know what. We don't need a partner to come in and embed themselves in our organization for the next two to three years, charge us amazingly crazy bills and workloads and stuff for workloads that are never-ending, because I think they've got.

Mark Smith: 24:22
I remember one of the big consulting brands, chris, you've worked for them. They would go in, right, and they would understand. This is my engagement experience with them. They would understand the price point. This customer would buy it, right. So it wasn't about pricing a project to what the project cost. It was understanding about what gets a contract signed. And they would get a contract signed and let's say the contract for the customer was, let's say, one and a half mil. And they were like, okay, we're allocating one and a half mil, and so, no matter how, let's say one and a half mil. And they were like, okay, we're allocating one and a half mil, and so, no matter how, let's say it was a $3 million piece of work, the price that it was sold on was one and a half million.

Mark Smith: 25:02
Four years later, after six million had been spent, right, because of the hey change request, let's chuck another change request. Oh no, we didn't scope that, just cr, cr, cr. You know. And these things would grow up and I think the customer has got to the point of going let's not play that game. Let's play it that we run our own projects and we will bring in resource where we need. The problem with that that's also fought with problems. The problem with that model is that they bring people in inside their organization to actually oversee and run the project. Yeah, and because they're part of the embedded customer, they're in the politics of that organization, and I often also find that when customers run their own projects, they also blow out budget-wise, because there's a whole different dynamic in play.

Ana Welch: 25:56
But they blow it out differently, though it's very political, it's always very political. And what are we talking about? There's no budget, like whenever I see fixed price, I cringe.

Chris Huntingford: 26:10
Oh, I like fixed price.

Ana Welch: 26:12
Exactly like Chris said, there's no, oh, I like fixed price.

Chris Huntingford: 26:18
Exactly like Chris said.

Ana Welch: 26:19
There's no. You like a fixed price. I'll tell you why. But there's no. We're going to deliver that in like 18 months time because everything just changes so, so rapidly yeah.

Andrew Welch: 26:41
I think that one and I don't want to lose track of what Anna just said yeah, Experimental AI implementations or development of AI, native workloads, differential AI, we have called it. I've been advising organizations to be much more basically, to make small, measured investment, demand that you see progress, not progress as a finished product. Right, I want to see that this augmented LLM works after a couple weeks of work. So two of these things go hand in hand, right, One is that you make the small investment towards incremental progress.

Andrew Welch: 27:30
But the other is that you have to be willing as an organization to walk away from a sunk cost. Right, you have to be willing as an organization to say you know what? Yes, we invested some money. Yes, we let the development of this AI thing, particular AI thing, go on for six weeks or eight weeks or six months. Right, but I do think that you get to a point and I'm not exactly sure where this is but that you know after a couple of months, often after a couple of weeks, you know if the thing is going to work or not. But you have to be, you have to have the courage to walk away from something that doesn't seem like it's going to pan out.

Chris Huntingford: 28:06
Yeah, it's. Oh man, there's a lot to unpack. Yeah, I have a lot to wheel around on here. Is that our next episode Might be. I just want to say something to what Mark said. I don't think all customers are that clued up. Can I tell you guys about a really shitty experience I had last week? Mainly because of me, but I spoke to a customer who's in higher education.

Chris Huntingford: 28:31
The people that were on the call were solution architects in the business for 25 years plus. Okay, they were obsessed with the use case Obsessed. They're like how are you going to drive ROI with Copilot? I'm like, dude, how do you drive ROI with Excel? Like, what was your use case? Is this the call where you drove, where everyone hung up on you? Yeah, three people left the call. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, three people left the call. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Huntingford: 28:52
You motherfuckers know who you are. Overhand five. Yeah, it was interesting because he didn't like that. He didn't like that at all. And I'm like but it's obvious, right, what is your use case for Excel? What is your use case for Word? No, we need to have money and define ROI for this thing. And I'm like but you don't know what the thing is yet. Right, like the use case of Copilot, is not.

Chris Huntingford: 29:14
I'm going to merge a document with the documents and then I'm going to put a value against it. That's not how it works. It's always going to be scenario driven. It's always going to plug into the wider discussion you have with your business, and that therein is the tyranny of the deliverable. It's saying we're trying to focus on the tiny little thing that drives a monetary value and you don't understand the wider picture yet. And it's very classic of what I would call the waterfall view. When we're looking at it from the top of the waterfall, we see everything, okay. But when you're in the middle or the bottom of the waterfall, when you look up, you can't see anything. But when you look down, you only see your little periphery and your little world. And the problem that we have with places like this is that when organizations like that try and adopt new tech, it is people like that that make them fall drastically behind, and that's a problem, and it's a big problem.

Ana Welch: 30:01
That is such a good analogy and actually I remember a real-life scenario. I was in South Africa, all places doing canyoning.

Andrew Welch: 30:14
Anna has had the best adventures.

Ana Welch: 30:16
Correct On top of, like a waterfall and I was supposed to like dive into it so I could see everything. And I thought that I saw everything, exactly like we think we see everything when we set up a project, right. And then I jumped into the waterfall because I didn't have, well, a child. So I was brave and when.

Ana Welch: 30:41
I jumped into the waterfall there was a tiny snake, it was brown and it was brown and it was incredibly dangerous. So the guy who was guiding us was trying to get me away from there and it's just such a good analogy. Exactly when you dive into like the project, there could be these very tiny deadly snakes and he's like you're gonna die in like 30 seconds. You better like fuck off, sorry and on that note but it's just like it's a great analogy to a project. We should use it more.

Mark Smith: 31:30
I like it, I like it, I like it. I'm gonna have to wrap there. Guys, we're at time. It's been a great discussion. Remember, this show is brought to you by Cloud Lighthouse. We hope to see you back again, if not at Dynamics Minds next week, but yeah, if you've got commentary that you want to add to what we're talking about, or you have some special insights and you'd like to come on a podcast with us, let us know. Reach out. We're all available on LinkedIn. We're pretty out there in different channels of how you can communicate with us. But thank you and see you on the next one.

Andrew Welch: 32:02
Bye guys, Thank you Bye, bye.

Mark Smith: 32:05
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 NZ365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.