The Architect of Change Craig White Unpacks the Power of Low-Code Innovation

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 England. He's an ecosystem architect at A&S Group. He was first awarded as MVP in 2024, so brand new. He's a low-code architect with 15 years experience across VBA, SQL Server, SharePoint, M365 Services and Power Platform. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Craig.

Craig White: 1:27
Thank you very much, Mark. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. It's good to be on this podcast. It feels weird, having listened to so many of them for what seems like ages now and learning a lot about other people. It feels surreal to be here. But thanks for inviting me. I really appreciate it.

Mark Smith: 1:44
It's great to have you on and somebody that's so new to the MVP program. I always like it's a chance to go hey, what's different, what's changed, that type of thing. But before we go there, tell me a bit about food, family, fun. What do they mean to you? What's your story? What's your origin story? How did you get into this game?

Craig White: 2:05
How did I get into this game? I came into this game of finance actually Not a direct career switcher but when I was 18, 17, 18, I was out of work, so I went down to the local job centre in England. This is before you could get online jobs. This is when jobs are in the backs of papers and stuff. I went to the job centre and got these little cards. I managed to get an office job. I did that for eight years, nine years.

Craig White: 2:31
So just putting invoices on systems. With the greatest respect, it's a junior role, it's an entry level role I moved down to. So I was living in London. For the non-UK listeners, if you imagine where London is and then look at the map of England and go right down to the bottom left, which is where Cornwall is, is where I live, 300 miles away. I moved down here in 15, 16 years ago I got the same kind of job to put invoices on systems. We got a new financial director and he decided to have one-to-ones with everyone I went in with. I want to just prove that I can do more than just key invoice numbers and values. Can someone give us a shot? I haven't got any bits of paper or qualifications, but I'd like to just have a go.

Craig White: 3:16
I got a role like higher up doing stuff with spreadsheets. I was in the finance department for a hospital. I spent six years doing that. I realized I didn't want to be an accountant but I loved automation, I loved code. It's pretty cool stuff. I just kind of then gravitated into different tech from there really Then went from that to access, then that into SQL Server and business intelligence, looking at a lot of integration with SharePoint on-prem and SSRS reporting and its old-school performance point cubes that you should be able to get into SharePoint. They were cool, I liked them. Then from that into SharePoint designer and info path and into Power Platform. So I've been with the Power Platform since 2016. So I think that's pretty much John Lauch, I think, and yeah, I've loved it ever since. So, yeah, a bit of a not necessarily a direct career switcher and not a conscious effort to go and change careers, but I just sort of seem to have yeah gravitated to an area which I actually love.

Craig White: 4:23
So yeah, I speak professionally food wise. If it's there to eat, I'll probably eat it. To be fair, I'm not fussy. I like a pizza, I like a curry, I've got a very sweet tooth, as my waistline will attest to that. Especially to get older, it seems to be quite harder to kind of shift off, but I do like a chocolate bar, I do like a beer Pretty standard stuff really. I like my sport, I've got an outside of work, I've got a wife and a daughter. She's eight years old. So, yeah, just general stuff, I think. Really I don't think I do anything or I'm into anything kind of too out there and mad or like socializing. I like my family, and I know the listeners won't be able to see this, but now you can see that I've got a massive pile of Lego behind me and people that have been on camera with me or know me quite well know that I really enjoy my big Lego sets and I enjoy building Lego with my daughter in my spare time as well. So yeah, a huge passion is the Lego.

Mark Smith: 5:23
So you're still in the Cornwall area.

Craig White: 5:26
I am, yes, a lovely part of England. It's a bit cut off to some extent, like it feels like we only got electricity last week. I think a lot of the people sort of get down to Bristol and then think that's where the country stops. There's this massive long stretch that carries on afterwards. I mean, I'm three hours from Bristol and I'm not even at the tail end of Cornwall, but it's a really safe place to bring up my daughter. It's lovely.

Mark Smith: 5:50
So much history down there right.

Craig White: 5:51
It's amazing If you go around through the engine houses.

Mark Smith: 5:56
Yeah, yeah, poleduck is what comes to mind when you're in the. Yeah yeah, there's lots of people there.

Craig White: 6:01
And who's that famous doctor on TV? A couple of his names, that's all filmed down here as well. There's loads of stuff that go on in Cornwall. You don't necessarily get the big bands that come through on a tour. They don't come down here and those big events or the big clubs and the big bars and we never got a Nando's down here that's how kind of we are.

Mark Smith: 6:21
Have you been to the Robin Crab Shack in Cornwall? No oh you got to go there. Right, I'm getting that. You get a big crab. You know all the different rums that they have in there.

Craig White: 6:33
It's just on the waterfront there.

Mark Smith: 6:36
You know I love Cornwall.

Craig White: 6:38
Yeah, it's gorgeous and I mean I list off a load of things that it hasn't got, but there's a lot of things that has got other places in the country Haven't got. I've got three beaches within five minutes drive and it's just. It's cheap and easy entertainment for the little one. We just go down there skimstones, climbing rocks, rock pooling, muckabow, and it's just fresh air. The air is so clean around here because it's all coming off the sea, it's all unpolluted and it's just. Yes, it's just a very chilled part of the work, part of the country. I think I'd lived in the rat race. I lived in London for many years. Some days I missed the hustle and bustle and I come. I go up there every now and then to see family, but then when I come back I'm just like ah yeah, I'm home. That's better, it's nice, it's a lovely part of the country. Thank you.

Mark Smith: 7:29
I see that you have a lot to do with ecosystems and your ecosystem architect at A&S. Tell us what are your thoughts around ecosystems. How do you explain it to people?

Craig White: 7:39
How do I explain it to people? The best way I explain it to people and it seems to resonate which is great is around enabling others to do things, not doing it yourself. That's the kind of, I think, the high level concept and it resonates a lot with me because, knowing me or otherwise, I've done that for many years. I've always enjoyed showing other people how to do things, helping them to kind of like upskill based on what I've learned, and I think that concept that Chris and Jason previous guests of yourself on the podcast have brought to where we work about it's not just about building an app and building a flow for someone, certainly not from a local perspective. It's about enabling a whole workforce to embrace these tools, because that, at the end of the day, is what they're built to be doing. It's almost like we've recreated that bottleneck we used to have with Procode internally, like you had this Procode team that would build stuff and everything went into them and you're done right. It was like, well, we haven't got enough people and they need to kind of hurry up and build these Procode solutions. So then Lococo comes in. Oh well, this is designed for everyone in the business to go and build stuff. You're admin assistants, you're finance clerks, whatever Go and build your own stuff. And we've created this same problem of now. We've got a Power Platform team and they deal with all of the internal automations and no one else does.

Craig White: 9:04
And I just love the whole thought of like actually no, enable your whole ecosystem to go and build this stuff, because everyone deserves the feeling that I've got when I get built. It's really cool, that does a good job at, you know, improving a process. I get a little buzz out of that. I want you to have that feeling. I want everyone else to have that feeling. They shouldn't have to have developer at the end of the name or architect. So that's my wider thing, is what it means to me. And then it's all the building blocks that go under that will to enable a whole ecosystem.

Craig White: 9:33
You've got to think about your governance, which is my stronger area, the technical side of Power Platform governance. That's where I sit. I know change management is a huge factor in that as well, something I'm not so hot on but want to be better at. There's loads of facets in there that can enable people's ecosystem is to go and be autonomous, and I love that thought. It's wicked and that's why I really enjoy my role with with A&S, because it's not just about building apps for the people. Well, we do that, and I still enjoy my own app. Every now and then they get me wrong, I still like getting my hands dirty. But evangelizing about the capability is, and helping others to build stuff like that's really cool, and you don't see a lot of people doing that, which is, I guess, makes what we do a little bit more unique, maybe, yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 10:18
Now that's. That's a I like what you said there about enabling other people, you know, to build solutions rather than just building it for them, and and you're so right about the pro code area, where that became a blocker, for really the backlog gets so long, right when, if you and the same thing is then happening in low code and it's better to enable people so they can build their own solutions, tell me, tell me about You've recently become an MVP, just this year, and I'm keen to know what was that process for you. Tell me about your journey to MVP.

Craig White: 11:47
Funny. I was talking to someone else about this recently actually Back in 2017, so not long after the Power Platform came out, we hadn't embraced it. Where I was, straight away, we were still using it for Path and SharePoint design. That please do not crucify me for that one. We were trying to use the SharePoint REST API to what will make the creation of SharePoint sites, because that was a very common request at the time. We're trying to work something out with API. So I did a bit of googling. I found an article from an MVP whose name I can't remember. Back then I think I was a little bit clueless about what an MVP was. I saw this badge and I saw this status. Oh wow, I want to be one of those. They must know everything.

Craig White: 12:29
I just put them on pedestals Fast forward in. Now, what? Eight years down the line, seven years, eight years? Now I fully understand what an MVP is and what's involved. It wasn't necessarily a gold of mine the last year or two to become an MVP. It's just happened organically, just for me getting some confidence out of somewhere to go and share what I know to a wider audience.

Craig White: 12:57
I said earlier that I've always enjoyed training and helping others, but I've always kept that to the people I work with. My team is my immediate people. Maybe that's a comfort thing, I don't know. Someone said to me last year I was like, well, what are you going to do? It's just going to do that. But to a wider audience I said oh, yeah, that's a good point. So, yeah, I started my blog last year yeah, may last year, without any intentions of being an MVP. So all those thoughts from 2017 is like, yeah, they're completely gone. Like, because I wasn't thinking about all the wrong reasons, I was like you know what? I'm going to start a blog.

Craig White: 13:32
I've wanted to do a blog for years. I've always enjoyed using other people's blogs to help me do stuff. I've always wanted to do that. So I just started and I'm flattered by the reception it's got. But, wow, like, forget the awards. The awards are wicked.

Craig White: 13:49
Right, I'm very flattered and honored and proud to be an MVP, but I prefer all the community stuff that I've got out of it. I've made new friends, new connections, new possibilities. That wouldn't have been possible had I not have just spent made more out of my own personal time rather than just sitting in front of Netflix, which is still cool, right, but actually doing something a bit more productive in my evenings rather than just vegging and mowning and looking at my phone and actually doing some fun stuff, which I enjoy as well. I enjoy my blog because with the ecosystem stuff I don't necessarily get to build stuff anymore because I'm helping other people, but in my spare time I can still muck about with code. I haven't got a sprint deadline to kind of worry about or you know, I haven't got any. Yeah, I haven't got any of those kind of pressures.

Craig White: 14:34
So it's been a wonderful journey this last year and a half. I went for a bit of a rocky patch a couple of years ago for a few personal things, so I've been kind of down and I've had a couple of people that have sort of lifted me back up to a really good spot and you realize what this community stuff is all about. It's not just about you know, sharing knowledge, it's about helping each other. And that's not just with the tech, it's with, you know, people to try and achieve, you know, if we feel the potential to try and achieve something greater than what they think they're capable of. So I'm all about paying that forward now as much as the technical stuff.

Craig White: 15:09
So it's been a wonderful journey, but it's just kind of the start of it. Really, like I said to you before we came on air, it's like I've already been in MVP a month. It doesn't feel it's not sunk in yet. It feels kind of weird, but I know maybe it will when the trophy is sitting behind me, because I know you get that nice little glass trophy. Maybe it'll sink in when that comes through the post, but up until that point it just yeah, it just feels a bit surreal, but yeah, it feels amazing, it feels wicked.

Mark Smith: 15:35
So tell me about technically. How did it happen? Who nominated you? Who guided you, who coached you to MVP?

Craig White: 15:45
Well, the person who nominated me is asked to obviously rename Nameless, so I respect that. But I had I mean many people listening will know Chris Huntingford. I'm lucky enough that I now work with him and I think he started at ANS along with Jason Earnshaw at the right time when I was probably at that lowest point that I've been in the last couple of years from a professional and a personal point of view. And I think the pair of them again forget necessarily like mentoring me towards MVP, but just mentoring me to be more confident and to just give me the lift that I needed to say hey, no, I am pretty good at what I do and I do know some stuff and go out there and show people, kind of thing. Those two especially who have been, I'll be forever grateful for those two.

Craig White: 16:32
But there's a few other people as well Lewis Baber, who I'm sharing. You know he's not long been out of school. The guy is an absolute machine. He's brilliant and I joked with him a while ago. It's like, genuinely, I'm old enough to be his father, which is kind of weird. And here there's this young man blossoming and he's just empowering these people around him Like people twice his age, like me and I was like what I was chatting to Lewis about blogging in Mark's table last year what can I blog about?

Craig White: 17:06
Who's going to listen to what I'm going to say? And he just came out with so many cool lines about it's always someone in the room that's going to learn, and I remember that. And I gave Lewis a topic and within like a minute he'd written down like 7, 8, 9 blog article ideas. Just like, wow, this is amazing. So to have those three people around me, yeah, I've been very lucky. I don't think a lot of people necessarily get the opportunity that I've had to be mental and uplifted by three very powerful people. But you know, you've got to make the most of these things when they happen, right.

Mark Smith: 17:39
Yeah, you just mentioned you know Lewis. You know you had a topic, five or six articles you've been blogging for a while. A lot of people go how do you come up with content to be able to blog? How do you and what is your blogging process? And I want you to kind of break it down for me from how do you make sure you've always got a big bag of topics to jump onto and then what is your process that you go through ultimately to publishing a post?

Mark Smith: 18:11
Idea wise it might be simple to you, right, but to a lot of people they want those practical steps. What are the actual steps you go through?

Craig White: 18:20
My brain doesn't sleep. That's the first important step, because last year I was diagnosed with ADHD and it makes a lot of sense because my brain does not stop firing. I wake up at random points in three o'clock in the morning and go, oh, that might be a good idea for a blog, and I write it down on my phone and I go back to sleep. So I can't see how I've got this big pool of ideas on my phone just random stuff, and I've probably duplicated loads of them. So sometimes I'll just sort of go through that list and go make some sense out of it of like, oh, what ideas might be good and can I chain a series out of them? So rather than just looking at one isolated post much like people might just look at a single app look at the wider picture and go, well, I've got this one blog post, but in order to do this blog post, I might need to blog about that first. In order to blog about that first, I might need to do blog at this first, and then I'll start breaking it down into bite-sized chunks. And then all of a sudden I've got like five, six, seven articles. Cool, well, there's those like my content for the next six weeks. So like I haven't got to rush around thinking, oh, what am I going to post this week, like I've kind of got an idea of like six to eight weeks, every moving goal, I have an idea of what I'm blogging about, in what order. So that's the first part getting like looking ahead, not just looking at one, but looking, yeah, three, four, five, six posts in advance. Then depends on the topic it probably be something technical, like it's a bit of code or a new feature. So, oh, I've got my intent. So I'll go and play around in there, because I don't want to regurgitate the articles of Microsoft, because you can go and look at those, so why wouldn't you? I want to look at my experiences with that. So I'm going to go, I'm going to click around and I'm going to blog about the bugs that I find or some little quirks and some other people aware of them, and just my experience is my findings. So that's, I tend to have a lot of time on my own 10 and just playing around with stuff and then trying to get my experience into it.

Craig White: 20:13
I think that was the key thing I wanted to do with my blog was just not make it like every other blog, and I don't mean that in a detrimental way to anyone, but a lot of it's very sort of practical business likes. I was like, well, can I put big different spins on things? So what experiences have I got that are unique? I built a solution for my wife last year for her self-employed business. I haven't seen anyone blog about that before. I'm still covering the same topic. So we're still talking about environment, variables, solutions, application, lifecycle management, very common themes. So people out there say, well, you know, people have only blogged about them things. It's like, yeah, I know, but I'm going to blog about them, but with my experience and my context, which is going to be different to yours and different to analysis. So yeah, the process is just planning, always important to plan.

Craig White: 21:02
I've got bits and notes of paper like knocking around in my desk in all kinds of weird places. If my wife moves them get really angry because I know what every bit of paper does and what every bit of paper means. And then I'm very lucky I've got a good balance at home. So I spend like an hour in the evenings like drafting some stuff up during the week Just to kind of get a rough flow with. What's my structure of my post, what section is going to go first, second and third, what's my beginning, middle and end and my story. And as I kind of work through the week, I just sort of go that doesn't feel quite right change a few bits around, then it gets to Sunday afternoon. That's when I kind of like sit down, stick some tunes on hyper focus and then kind of like, finish my article and then it's ready to go on Tuesday.

Craig White: 21:46
I always leave myself a day. I don't want to finish on Sunday and post on a Monday. I like to just decompress, take a day, come back to it on a Monday evening. So before I came on here this evening, this is a Monday for me. I've reread the post that's going out tomorrow morning with fresh eyes to make sure that there's no spelling mistakes and it still flows well and I don't miss anything. I always like to give myself a day in between finishing the article and posting it, at least so I can kind of just send it, check it. So that's my process Think of ideas, plan ahead and just take your time. It's worked for me, see, it might not work for others, but it works for me and basically, importantly, I enjoy it. I look forward to coming online after a little one's in bed and just mucking about with some power effects for an hour and a half Like I'm, like a kid in a sweet shop. It's wicked.

Mark Smith: 22:39
Final question For those listening that are aspiring to become MVPs themselves. What would you advise them?

Craig White: 22:48
I'd advise the same thing that the person in 2017 said to me when I said I want to be an MVP. He said if you want to be an MVP, don't try and become an MVP and I've heard that advice given to others a lot, and by that I mean it's all well and good having this status and this badge, but the main goal of being an MVP is sharing your knowledge, sharing what you know, helping other people Do that with passion, with excitement, and all the other accolades and awards whether it's an MVP or a former super user or whatever that will all come naturally. I think Helping other people that's what it's all about. Helping people in the community to learn these tools, to be better with them, to learn from your mistakes.

Craig White: 23:38
I'm quite open to mistakes I've made. I engage regularly with clients saying, yeah, here's my mess ups, so you don't have to do them. Dishelping other people. I think that's If you want to become an MVP, just start there, just try and share what you know and, as Lewis said to me, there's always one person in the room that's going to learn right. So just keep doing that and keep momentum with it and eventually it's a bit like employing a month, I'd say and I've said this on another podcast recently like if you rock up to work and you do your hours and you work hard and you're consistent, the bonuses and the awards and promotions will come over time. If you try too hard to get them, you're not going to get them Because people could spot a try hard, too hard, you know. Oh no, he's not doing this, he's not doing that. It's the same thing for the community stuff. If you rock up, show add value, help people, over time all the other good stuff will come. So that would be my advice really.

Mark Smith: 24:35
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host Business Application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time.