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Changing working habits - WFH isn't easy

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As a departure from my usual posts, I wanted to share my thoughts on coping during the biggest change to our professional life: COVID-19. Social distancing rules have meant that a lot more of us are having less social contact with our colleagues, family and friends. This leads to stress and anxiety, exhibited in numerous ways, and if not tackled, depression.

Further, our professional interactions are very different. Those workshops to thrash out issues are no longer. Getting the time with key stakeholders who are fire-fighting the effects on the business of COVID-19 rules is hard. We have to learn to work in different ways, particularly as I think this will be a marathon. Ensuring you are approaching these trying times with the correct mental attitude is key to your success.

I admit, in a previous life, I had clinically diagnosed depression. My life was routine: Commute, Work, Commute, Dinner, TV. This led to thoughts in my mind around how I was perceived at work and at home. Nothing I did was acceptable, nothing anyone else did was good enough. I struggled to think about anyone apart from myself. My family were hit hardest, with mood swings, erratic behaviour and shouting. For that, I apologise to my family, friends and colleagues.

I want to just highlight a few points that are helping me rationalise my health these days and understand how we can help others with our interactions. In my view, the way to evaluate a community or group is to look at how they treat and support the weakest in their group. At this time, we should take this to mean how we support everyone in these unusual times.

Your routine has changed - Keep the separation

When we all used to commute to work, we had an hour in our own thoughts. We had a separation from work and home. This was time for our brains to consider the day and switch between the 2 main characters in our life: Work and Home.

As this changes to walking to your kitchen table, that time disappears. Your two personas can merge, but more importantly, your brain doesn’t have time to digest.

Give yourself time to differentiate between home and work. Take 20 minutes, read a book, go for a walk or listen to Spotify album at the end of your day to separate the two.

Socialise at work

When I am in the office, I get interrupted at least twice an hour, people asking questions or overhearing conversations. Mostly work-related and is the reason why project teams work best when they are in the same location. Not only do you have more understanding of what is happening in your project that is not part of your focus area, but you also get to know your colleagues, understand they are having a bad day or that they have a hangover (you know who you are). This time breaks the day, disrupts your flow and sometimes clarifies the picture.

Try starting each call with a chat, rather than getting straight to business. There are always latecomers to a call, so use this time to gossip, talk about the latest Netflix docudrama or check if someone has enough toilet roll.

Also, force it. We have had great success in taking the last hour of the workday twice a week and forcing a chat. No agenda, no pressure to join, but a check-in point for everyone. This needs to have management buy-in, but not led by management. We try and not talk shop, but it is inevitable. Those banter moments you had in the office should surface here too - comedy is the best way to elevate the mood.

Socialise at home

My involvement in the community over the last year has meant that I was going out more, interacting more and chatting more than ever before. This shouldn’t stop just because we are not allowed to go to a pub or meet for a user group.

Chris Huntingford has made this an art form by creating the Bespoke Badger, a regular pub night which he hosts where anarchy ensues. This can be a little wild and usually includes alcohol. As you can see, the great and the good of our community are in full force.

I realise this isnt for everyone, so there are other things happening, including lunch time hosted by Dave Burrell.

The point is, arrange some interaction with your friends. Poker nights, book (wine) club, curry night, they all can still happen. Zoom is free, up to 40 minutes, but redialing in straight away works just fine. Don’t forget your family and not just the ones you talk to daily but remember Great Aunt Maude. Calling her will make her day! Do realise that you may take 30 of the 40 minutes getting Aunt Maude up and running though.

Don’t expect the same pace

I am lucky, I have two teenage boys. On a typical day, they don’t require my attention for long, if at all. To be honest, as long as the fridge is full and the WiFi works, they are good for weeks.

Other members of my team will have young children, juggling keeping them entertained with holding down their role. Be lenient with them, expect interruptions, expect those meetings to be cancelled last minute.

via GIPHY

Also, a lot of businesses, if not all, are under such different pressures since the start of social distancing: keeping helpdesks open with little staff, creating products suitable for a different way to do business, working with their other partners to ensure their service is still available. Gone are the days when you can thrash out a solution by bringing in stakeholders across the country for a 1/2 day workshop.

Time with your business owners will be sacrosanct. Ensure your meetings are essential and have a list of decisions to be made. We have to adapt as consultants and help our customers through these difficult times. This will generally be doing a lot more thinking for them, creating options rather than expecting them to come up with a solution.

Exercise

I know, I am not the perfect role-model for fitness, but getting out in the world is a great way of clearing your head. That call you are on, do you need to see a screen? Could you walk while you listen in? Concentration is key on a call, listening and walking is easy.

What about that decorating you have been putting off? You may struggle to get wallpaper but preparing for a day when you can is a great way of getting away from work. Getting out in the garden, preparing for the future summer with friends and family really gives hope for a time when we can laugh at this situation.

Scottish Summit - A Review

Sat, 07 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The extra day a year only comes around every 4 years and it seemed appropriate that a lot of the Power Platform community came together to celebrate in Glasgow.

Scottish Summit 2020 was sponsored by Avanade and myself and several colleagues went along to enjoy the event, cement Avanade in the community, share our knowledge and learn from others.

With over 1000 people descending on the University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre, this event is one of the biggest, free, community organised events in Europe. Our hosts, Iain Connolly and Mark Christie have worked hard to promote the event and established it quickly as the place to be for D365 / Azure / Office users and partners to be.

First Day – Common Data Service Hack

My first day at the conference was participating in the CDS Hackathon. Chris Huntingford and Lucy Bourne from Microsoft introduced us to the requirements for the hack and 20 of us spent the day being creative in groups to resolve an environmental challenge. Our group decided to tackle our carbon footprint, highlighting how our day-to-day choices can have an impact on the environment.

Combining a Forms Pro questionnaire, a Power App for the collation of data by council employees, a Modal driven app to maintain the questions and Power BI to visualise it, we produced a solution that would be ready for use within 3 hours! This shows the power of the Low code capabilities of the Power Platform and teamwork!

Thanks to @LeeMBaker for the photo

On Friday evening I managed to catch up with a lot of the Microsoft team attending the event, discussing the partner landscape, challenges they are seeing and how we can work with them to overcome these challenges.

Scottish Summit Saturday

On Saturday, after an early start, we set out our stall. Avanade was showcasing our capabilities to the attendees with D365, across Customer Engagement and Finance and Operations. Mixed Reality has become a big topic within the community, and we were lucky to be able to showcase a HoloLens 2. This was a big crowd-pleaser, with a lot of attendees experiencing this technology for the first time.

Explaining how Mixed Reality can be used for training, 3rd line support or visualisations of products in your environments was an eyeopener to a lot of people and it was great to showcase Avanade’s capability and some customer successes.

Keynote – This is more than just technology…..

What a start! Jon Levesque, Senior Platform Evangelist for the Power Platform at Microsoft was piped into the main hall, with a kilt on to celebrate our location.

Photo courtesy of @MarijnSomers (corrected)

He started with his personal journey, starting from being a member of the team that supported Steve Ballmer when he was giving talks across the world to his role now, where he is paid to fly around the world and evangelise on the Power Platform.

Jon gave pertinent stories about how the Power Platform has changed people and businesses across the world, empowering people in their day jobs to think about creating solutions to benefit their role.

His enthusiasm for the community and how it impacts the lives of everyone was infectious. Everyone left with a sense of belonging and enthusiasm to develop themselves and their businesses to the next level

Throughout the day, there were various sessions that we attended to educate ourselves.

Session 1 - To Code or not to Code - That is the Question

My first session was given by Scott Durow and Sara Lagerquist, both Microsoft Valued Professionals and at the top of their game. Their talk was about the perceived battlegrounds that have been drawn between LowCode and Pro-Dev practitioners.

Sara argued that Low-code, via Power Apps, Power Automate and the other numerous members of the Power Platform are allowing for a more reactive and time frames for users to achieve the solutions they need in their businesses. She highlighted that coding can lead to technical debt, development bottlenecks and reduced user adoption.

Scott countered these arguments by highlighting that bad solutions can come from low-code or pro dev equally, and each has its place in bring solutions to live. Gone are the days when grumpy developers can hold BAs and functional consultants hostage with their use of technical terms

But the outcome of their presentation was showing that we need to remove the barriers. Technical and functional need to co-exist and work with each other to use the right technology for the problem. Low code has great use cases to empower individuals to expand their applications across data silos, but if you want a speedy integration would Power Automate fit the bill? Encouraging Functional and Technical consultants to have conversations early on in a project and recognising the diversity of their skill sets would lead to increased user adoption and improved solutions.

Session 2 - Mixed Reality - Extending D365 on the next frontier

Kyle Hill, one of Avanade’s MVP hosted a session on Mixed Reality. He used the session to show the capabilities of Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 and how it empowers everyone within a business. From architectural uses – walking through a floor plan to first-line service staff - providing visual clues to while they are resolving a problem on customer site.

He also walked through how a low-code approach can be taken to augment the view of a user and the tools Microsoft provides to create this content.

It was a great show of how this emerging technology will soon be as widespread as mobile phones, available to all at a price point to match. I love the fact that Avanade is at the front of this adoption and are bringing this technology to businesses of all scales to change their approach to solving problems and transforming their processes.

Session 3 - Top 20 Tips for Surviving Networking at Events

Not every session is a technical one, Lucy Bourne, another Microsoft employee delivered a great session on how individuals can address their anxieties to better involve them in our community. In any community, when you begin, it is a room of strangers and lots of people are anxious about reaching out and getting involved.

Photo courtesy of @D365Geek

Lucy gave a whistle-stop guide to her 20 tips to survive these moments, gain confidence in your interactions and get involved. She highlighted that everyone has the same fears, everyone thinks they are an imposter at times and every one is unique. If you be yourself, “celebrate your onlyness”, as she puts it, and be genuine, then you can address your fears and become part of the big family we have as a community.

Session 4 – PowerApps – A Thunderbolt of Functional Awesome

To round out my day, I went to see Chris Huntingford, a Microsoft Partner Technical Architect show his audience how quick and easy it is to create a production application using low-code techniques and the tools make available to us via the Power Platform.

He explained the benefits and fundamentals of the Power Platform and how we should be engaging with it as users, empowering businesses to democratise their data. He further made it clear that there is only a limited pool of developers, but if we encourage our business users to make edge apps with the data that is available to them, companies can save time and money.

Towards the end of the session, he built an application within minutes, truly showing the flexibility of the platform.

In conclusion

Scottish Summit was a great event, it highlighted the great community we have. With speakers coming from Australia, America and all over Europe, it is an event that has started to become a must for anyone involved in the Microsoft stack.