Engaging our employees with AskHR

AskHR is our internal employee-engagement application that Microsoft Digital (the IT organization) built for supporting inquiries to Microsoft’s HR department and managing ongoing cases related to those inquiries. Our employees use the app to submit many diverse requests, from ones as basic as “Where can I get drinking water?” or “How do I apply for a specific benefit?” to more complex cases like moving to a new location or job or dealing with an illness. Based on these requests, the team of advisors at Microsoft HR engages with employees to ensure that their requests are fulfilled in a timely and efficient manner.

AskHR supports an intake of more than 4,500 new inquiries per day, using an array of channels, including email and web integrations with other HR platforms. Our global AskHR team consists of more than 1,400 HR advisors spread across 12 HR functions and divided into more than 250 HR support teams. Microsoft has more than 220,000 global employees.

Employee inquiries have been increasing exponentially in parallel with the increase in employees hired each year at Microsoft. In the past 10 years, we’ve gone from supporting a few thousand inquiries a year, to supporting more than 1 million employee inquiries and transactions annually. In addition, we now have rigid controls around access provisioning, review, country/region-mandated compliance, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and annual privacy reviews. We’ve also broadened our request intake mechanisms from email-based intakes to several other intake channels including Web API and virtual agent. Processes supported by AskHR include:

Support for global new-hire onboarding and internal employee transfer. We use AskHR for the complete employee onboarding process for new employees and employees transferring to new positions and business groups within Microsoft.

Support for former employees’ queries related to their employment history. Former employees can use AskHR to retrieve personnel files even after they’re no longer a Microsoft employee.

Transactional queries and access management for data-management teams. Our data teams can capture important insights across all aspects of the employee-inquiry process.

Employee and dependent benefits queries. All benefits queries are channeled through AskHR, and employees can retrieve applicable information and processes for researching or claiming benefits.

Complex employee inquiries. Hundreds of requests come through AskHR each day that range from hybrid-work support to employee performance to policy and governance reference. Many of these require specific involvement of HR staff and complex case-management activities.

Center of Excellence support queries. Many company programs originating from our central HR teams including rewards and hybrid work leverage AskHR as the primary employee experience interface to address questions and, where appropriate, route to experts for further consultation.

AskHR gives Microsoft HR the ability to react quickly to changes within our corporate environment. When COVID-19 hit, we were able to organize and prioritize pandemic-related cases, allocate advisors to the proper queues, and shift the focus of our HR support to meet needs on an ongoing basis, whether day-to-day or week-to-week, as different demands and situations came and went.

—Andrew Winnemore, general manager, HR Services

The need for AskHR reflects a larger trend in which HR—and the integral role it plays in key decisions—is becoming central to operations for companies of all sizes. With this change, the role of how HR engages with organizations’ employees has also shifted. For example, it’s understood that retaining employees today requires more than competitive compensation and benefits. Microsoft and other organizations must also consider how they engage with employees in critical support scenarios, while making sure that engagement is performed in a timely, relevant, and authentic manner.

“AskHR gives Microsoft HR the ability to react quickly to changes within our corporate environment,” says Andrew Winnemore, a vice president in HR Services. “When COVID-19 hit, we were able to organize and prioritize pandemic-related cases, allocate advisors to the proper queues, and shift the focus of our HR support to meet needs on an ongoing basis, whether day-to-day or week-to-week, as different demands and situations came and went.”

Transforming HR interaction with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform

We’re transforming the way we interact with our employees on AskHR with Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform. The tools and capabilities that these solutions provide have enabled us to build a robust and resilient employee engagement system that both our employees and advisors love to use.

We’ve built our entire HR support platform around Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform technologies. We’re using many of the built-in capabilities to better support Microsoft HR. Using technologies including AI and machine learning, Power Virtual Assistant, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams collaboration, and Customer Voice, we’ve enabled Microsoft HR to deliver a highly intuitive employee interaction solution that engages our employees in ways that were previously only equated with customer interactions.

—Mahesh Sharma, director, AskHR Cross Industry Solutions

Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides a suite of capabilities that enable us to deliver the best experience for our employees and HR advisors throughout the inquiry and case-management process. With its omnichannel capabilities, Customer Service allows Microsoft HR advisors to take customer requests from many different avenues, manage multiple sessions at a time, interact with multiple apps without losing context, and enhance their workflow with productivity tools.

AskHR is built around the core of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform. Most AskHR functionality is hosted in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and supported by other Dynamics 365 components and solutions built from the Power Platform. Examples of this functionality include HR case management, employee interaction, knowledge-base management, service-level agreement (SLA) management, and sentiment analysis.

“We’ve built our entire HR support platform around Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform technologies,” says Mahesh Sharma, a former AskHR Engineering PM Lead in Microsoft Digital. “We’re using many of the built-in capabilities to better support Microsoft HR. Using technologies including AI and machine learning, Power Virtual Assistant, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams collaboration, and Customer Voice, we’ve enabled Microsoft HR to deliver a highly intuitive employee interaction solution that engages our employees in ways that were previously only equated with customer interactions.”

Additional capabilities in AskHR are supported by several Dynamics 365 services and Microsoft Power Platform–built capabilities:

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice supports our employee feedback process with survey forms and workflows that are easy to create and manage. Customer Voice offers an agile and user-friendly interface to manage surveys that helps ensure that our employees feel empowered and encouraged to provide open-ended feedback. Employees can also provide timely and near-immediate feedback directly from the email they receive, which makes it more intuitive for them to respond to. These changes have increased our survey response from 9 percent to 22 percent over the last year.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights and Microsoft Power BI. Real-time reporting, insights, and analytics are an important part of day-to-day operational decisions by our advisors and key planning decisions by HR leadership. Customer Service Insights uses AI and analytics capabilities to identify and predict trends and other insights. The real-time insights that we receive from Customer Service Insights provide managers with business-critical information on the case volumes within their teams and trending topics that help them to better coordinate with other HR teams. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics built into Power BI reports are used to inform most HR-related support decisions.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Knowledge Management. Our HR teams use Microsoft Knowledge Base articles to curate, maintain, and govern responses to thousands of common requests using a single point of management and a common feedback loop. This process ensures that the articles are accurate and current. It also provides a single repository of answers for employees, eliminates duplication of materials, and reduces circulation of conflicting information.

Power Virtual Agent. Our Power Virtual Agent chat bot is becoming the default first triage agent on the web for AskHR. Power Virtual Agent has been managing approximately 15 percent of all AskHR inquiries globally. It’s emerging as the fastest growing method to respond to our employee inquiries and reduce the ever-increasing burden on our advisors due to the growth of our employee population over the past few years.

Power Platform AI Builder. We use AI Builder to analyze user sentiment, predict HR case activities, and triage cases to the appropriate queues. AI Builder provides prebuilt models and the ability to create custom models that support scenarios relevant to AskHR. These models continually learn and refine their behavior based on AskHR data. The models inform many aspects of employee engagement, including case routing, sentiment analysis, spam filtering, and automation activities.

Power Automate. We use Power Automate to simplify and expedite communication and process workflow activities throughout AskHR. These include notifying an advisor when a case is assigned to them, sending out an acknowledgement when employees create a case, or generating notifications whenever activities need to be created based on an event.

Generating business and technical value with native functionality

In an organization as large as Microsoft, the HR environment is broad and complex. Using Dynamics 365 and Power Platform enables us to achieve quality, resiliency, flexibility, and accurate observation in AskHR that far exceeds the capabilities of our previous solution and requires far less customization.

Deep collaboration with our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform product groups has helped us deliver several advanced HR-related features, avoiding costly customizations. This has been a very symbiotic relationship where we proactively reach out to them for capabilities we want in the product and where they reach out to us to help validate future functionality they’re building into the product.

—Gayatri Garapati, AskHR engineering SWE lead, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Most functionality that we use in AskHR is based on native, out-of-the-box features supported by Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Services, which handle our large array of HR needs, from managing onboarding for almost 200 employees per month to ensuring that questions about benefits and resources are answered quickly and effectively. As a result of this simplicity, our design and engineering principles and practices are more easily achievable, and more robust and reliable.

Engineering excellence

Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital are Customer Zero for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform product group teams. By collaborating actively with the product groups, we help them implement several features that are critical to not only our HR needs but also to many external customers. As Customer Zero, we work with the product group teams, testing features and ensuring that the design and quality are completely ready for production environments before features are released for General Availability. At any given time, we have several Customer Service and Power Platform features in beta release that we’re co-innovating on with the product group.

“Deep collaboration with our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform product groups has helped us deliver several advanced HR-related features, avoiding costly customizations,” says Gayatri Garapati, an AskHR engineering SWE lead in Microsoft Digital. “This has been a very symbiotic relationship where we proactively reach out to them for capabilities we want in the product and where they reach out to us to help validate future functionality they’re building into the product.”

Monitoring and alerts

We have alerts created for all applicable scenarios across AskHR use cases. We can audit alerts, perform proactive monitoring, and consolidate alerts as a result. The alerting system connects directly with our operations management and ticketing systems, using out-of-the-box capability. We use several monitoring scenarios and alerts to ensure that our employees and advisors receive the optimal HR experience and notify our engineering teams of potential issues. Some key examples include:

• Intake activities that aren’t converted to tickets.
• Emails that aren’t successfully sent to customers when advisors respond.
• Employee information that doesn’t match data stored in Azure Active Directory.

Data insights

Built-in data insight capability lets us leverage all data sources that support AskHR. We have reporting capabilities within each component, but also the capability to report across the entire AskHR landscape with Power BI. AI and machine learning capabilities support data analysis that helps our advisors and leadership understand all aspects of employee engagement.

For example, our Escalation Management dashboard helps HR teams identify important and urgent requests coming through AskHR. We introduced sentiment analysis as part of the Escalation Management dashboard to better understand escalation needs across employee requests, even if the employee didn’t mark the request as urgent in the interface. Sentiment analysis parses all inbound correspondences and communications from the employee, then identifies occurrences of negative sentiment or urgency and marks such cases as potential escalations. Escalation management functionality also reviews other information such as the number of queue hops and number of times a case is reopened to also flag them as potential escalations. These potential escalations are moved to the top of their queues so that HR advisors can proactively address these cases before they truly become escalations. Sentiment analysis has flagged more than 250,000 inbound conversations to date.

Driving dynamic and intelligent case-management activities

Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Power Platform enable our advisors and employees to work across the entire span of AskHR activities seamlessly and interactively, with real-time responsiveness and trackable processes. The following list contains the supported activities and components:

• Intake. Case intake is the entry point for employees to submit requests to Microsoft HR. AskHR uses Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Power Virtual Agents, and Microsoft Azure API Management to support a huge array of intake channels including our web-based portal, Virtual Agent, email, and API.
  
  Example: An employee in California uses the web portal to contact HR support requesting details on parental leave and policies. The AI builder model parses the details of the incoming conversation and associated employee metadata and identifies the Benefits Service Line as the best team to support the request. The case is routed to the queue for US benefits support.
• Handling. HR advisors need to understand and categorize incoming requests in preparation for engaging with employees to resolve a concern. Power Platform AI Builder, Power Apps component framework, and Dynamics 365 dashboards enable our advisors to capture case details quickly and easily by using AI for classification and sentiment analysis and providing relevant contextual information.
  
  Example: A benefit-related case raised by an US-based employee, flagged for urgent attention, surfaces onto a queue manager dashboard. The queue manager consults a real-time availability dashboard and assigns the case to an available advisor who specializes in US benefits policies.
• Assignment. Advisors are responsible for ensuring that cases are triaged properly and assigned to appropriate team members for resolution, but they don’t need to do all the work. AskHR uses Power Automate Workflow and the Dynamics 365 plugin framework to support automated triage for most activities, while routing difficult assignments to advisors for quick, efficient triage.
  
  Example: Upon receiving a new case in their dashboard, the advisor checks recent case history and other work-related details for the employee, using the contextual information associated with the case. They use Teams collaboration to reach out to a benefits specialist consultant to gather more information and ask questions. They can add notes into the case details.
• Response. Advisors engage with employees to provide answers, perform a transaction, gather information, or determine if they need to involve another team member in the case. AskHR provides automated insertion of knowledge-base articles into cases, use AI-based intelligent pre-search for surfacing relevant articles, and sentiment analysis to understand employee sentiment.
  
  Example: Advisor responds back to the employee with a Dynamics 365 article that answers the inquiry and provides some real-time details.
• Escalation and routing. AskHR supports automated escalation and routing across many scenarios, including employee sentiment, case lifecycle, and case classification. AI Builder and Power BI dashboards enable our advisors to manage and observe escalation and routing behavior at any point in the lifecycle.
  
  Example: After the employee has reviewed the details requested, they want to follow through with the parental-leave process. The benefits advisor contacts the employee to understand the details of their query. At any point in the escalation and routing process, the advisor might consult with subject matter experts in the query subject area, including the Center of Excellence program team.
• Resolution. Ensuring that a case is resolved properly is critical to engaging our employees effectively. AskHR uses Dynamics 365 Customer Service case categorization and the PowerApps control framework to provide advisors with the functionality they need to confirm resolution efficiently.
  
  Example: Having clarified all employee questions, the benefits advisor is ready to resolve the case. They verify the categorization done earlier and add closing case metadata that will help with analytics.
• Survey. After resolution, AskHR uses Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to collect employee feedback. Power BI reports and dashboards are in place to help advisors and Microsoft HR leadership identify successes and opportunities for improvement throughout the case-management lifecycle.
  
  Example: When the case is marked as resolved, a survey is automatically sent to the employee. Upon survey completion, the consultant’s manager can check the employee’s feedback and ratings for HR support.

AskHR uses Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to support the case management lifecycle at Microsoft HR.

Next steps

We’re not done. This is a continuous journey and we’re focusing on improvements to several areas, including advisor productivity, process automation, and live assistance. We’re also working with the product group to add and improve Dynamics 365 Customer Service capabilities, including unified routing, improved knowledge management, and deeper natural language understanding AI.

The HR advisors and front-end line managers love the low code flexibility that Power Automate provides. It helps them support complex business processes, while still working within the constructs of a well-defined case-management lifecycle. This allows the engineering team to focus on critical infrastructural and technological advancements, while HR advisors are empowered to create flows that best support their processes in a rapid and efficient manner. We’ve seen a steady 20 percent year-over-year increase in adoption of the platform through some of the most complex employee scenarios presented by COVID-19, hybrid workplace management, and employee investigations.

—Abhinav Jhingan, AskHR HR solution lead, HR Services

With Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Power Platform, AskHR has been resilient, scalable, and dependable, while giving us the freedom to adapt AskHR functionality to change and grow with our organization. We expect that flexibility to continue to improve as we seek to increase employee engagement, better support our advisor user base, and prepare for future HR-specific needs at Microsoft.

“The HR advisors and front-end line managers love the low code flexibility that Power Automate provides,” says Abhinav Jhingan, an AskHR HR solution lead in HR Services. “It helps them support complex business processes, while still working within the constructs of a well-defined case-management lifecycle. This allows the engineering team to focus on critical infrastructural and technological advancements, while HR advisors are empowered to create flows that best support their processes in a rapid and efficient manner. We’ve seen a steady 20 percent year-over-year increase in adoption of the platform through some of the most complex employee scenarios presented by COVID-19, hybrid workplace management, and employee investigations.”

Continued adoption of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform features across AskHR has delivered significant benefits for our HR users. Movement to our browser-based unified client interface has saved more than 3,000 advisor hours each month due to the streamlined interface. Our AI-based spam model has helped eliminate hundreds of thousands of incoming spam emails at 97.89 percent accuracy. We’ve also used AI to interpret user sentiment for approximately 1.4 million employee messages in the last six months. We’ve seen significant improvement in several areas of employee engagement and HR efficiency, including:

• Reduced case resolution time. Due primarily to automatic routing and contextual data sharing, we’ve reduced case resolution time by 18 hours per case, on average.
• Improved NSAT ratings. Our net satisfaction (NSAT) rating for employees and advisors has increased by almost 10 percent.
• Improved advisor productivity. Our advisors are spending approximately 12 minutes less per case than they did before AskHR.
• Increased first-time fix rates. Our rate for fixing an issue or closing a case after the first point of HR contact is 29 percent.

• Learn how Microsoft is helping its employees understand their value with the Total Rewards Portal.
• Find out how Microsoft is updating its core Human Resources system with SAP SuccessFactors.
• See how Microsoft is reinventing the employee experience for a hybrid world.

The post ‘Got a question?’ Boosting employee engagement at Microsoft with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

No matter who you are, if you don’t stay on top of your calendar, it can take on a life of its own. It’s very easy to lose control of how many events and meetings we have each day, week, or month. We all want to make sure we’re using our time wisely and that it aligns with broader goals and deliverables.

Using the Microsoft Power Platform combined with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft executives, directors, and teams now have more visibility into how they spend their time. They can do this thanks to a new internally built solution that uses the Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Outlook to analyze their calendar data.

Gaining insight into executives’ calendars

Microsoft executives are under considerable pressure to rationalize their calendars, to learn where they focus their time, with whom they want to focus their time with, and then use that data to prioritize their time. They want answers to questions such as “How much time am I spending talking to HR?”, “How many one-on-ones am I taking?”, “How much time am I spending talking to customers and partners?”, and “Am I going to meet my objectives and key results?”

We wanted to create solutions that enable our senior leadership to make the most of their time. We used our technology stack to close gaps in the tools they were using to manage their calendars.

—Claire Sisson, principal PM, Productivity Studio

To overcome this challenge, executive assistants and chiefs of staff for Microsoft’s top executives were tasked with finding a way to drill down into the data to see how these senior leaders were spending their time. They extrapolated calendar data and added events, and then created categories to make sense of the data in Microsoft Excel.

Then, they turned to the Productivity Studio team in Microsoft Digital Employee Experiences.

“We wanted to create solutions that enable our senior leadership to make the most of their time,” says Claire Sisson, a principal PM who leads the Productivity Studio team. “We used our technology stack to close gaps in the tools they were using to manage their calendars.”

Leveraging the Microsoft Power Platform

Microsoft’s Productivity Studio team helps business groups across the company enable product stacks using Microsoft 365 products. For this project, the team was tasked with creating an automated way to capture calendar data, store it, and analyze it so executives could quickly see how they were spending their time.

It settled on a low-code/no-code solution based on the Microsoft Power Platform that leverages Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI. A Power App connects the solution to Microsoft Outlook and enables you to configure your calendar so you can determine what events you want to include or exclude. Power Automate captures the data from the calendar and brings it into the database (Dataverse). Power BI is used on top of Dataverse in a Power App dashboard to get insights on the imported data.

Because Microsoft Power Apps are low code/no code, any IT admin or citizen developer can edit the solution based on their needs. The platform also enables them to build a solution themselves fast using repeatable parts. So, the solution is easily extendable for easier customization.

“You can use Power Apps to digitize and automate processes much faster than you can with traditional custom software,” says Evan Lew, a group product manager for Microsoft Power Apps. “And low code means you can more easily make adjustments and tailor the solution to the users’ needs.”

When it came to building a solution that would help the company’s executives wrangle their time, one of the Productivity Studio’s most significant challenges was to reduce the number of steps and button clicks during installation. It took more than 30 steps to install and onboard an early version of the solution. The team turned to Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power BI to solve this.

The solution they built is available to Microsoft 365 customers via Microsoft AppSource. External customers can get the Microsoft Power Apps package here and the Microsoft Power BI package here. AppSource offers various applications and solutions that work with Windows365 products, allowing users to enable innovation, drive business outcomes, and help them get more done with the tools they already have.

The solution is the most beneficial for people with several different categories of meetings or events they need to analyze.

—Joe Martin, senior product manager, Productivity Studio

“We think this solution will help a lot of executives and other leaders get more out of their most limited resource—their time,” says Naveen Kumar Jangir, the lead Microsoft 365 architect from Microsoft partner Avanade who helped build the solution.

More control over your calendar

With this solution, Microsoft executives can use the data for strategic decision-making regarding how they spend their time. They can now more effectively impact the organization and focus on areas that are more impactful to overall team and organization goals.

“The solution is the most beneficial for people with several different categories of meetings or events they need to analyze,” says Joe Martin, a senior product manager for Productivity Studio.

Currently, the solution has been deployed for a handful of teams for various Microsoft executives, with the goal for it to be deployed to senior leaders across every group. Executives are already using it to see a breakdown of their events, including time spent talking with various departments, the number of one-on-one meetings that they’re holding, time spent talking to customers and partners, and time spent at conferences.

This project also allowed the Productivity Studio team to combine Microsoft products in new and innovative ways that empower executives and others who need to improve how they manage their calendars. It can take learnings and data about how the products function and give it to the product team, improve it, and empower more people. Productivity Studio provides an opportunity to centralize innovation and give back to the products through feedback, product gaps, and new solutions.

“We wanted to create solutions that enable our senior leadership to make the most of their time,” says Sisson. “We used elements of our technology stack to close gaps in the tools they were using to manage their calendars.”

• Reuse versus reinvent: Consider if you can use tools you already have to transform your internal business processes.
• Stay curious: See how you can leverage your current stack to empower your users the most.
• Listen to your users: Continually get feedback from your users to see what scenarios you can help improve or optimize.
• Use product limitations to innovate: Create solutions to fill in the gaps that your product might have to build a more robust product.

• Find out more on how Microsoft is reinventing its Employee Experience for a Hybrid World.
• Learn how Microsoft uses OKRs to achieve business goals.
• Check out how Microsoft deploys and manages Microsoft 365 within the company.

The post Transforming how Microsoft executives use their time with Microsoft Outlook calendar analytics appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Our aging content management system needed to be replaced, so we—the Inside Track team in Microsoft Digital (MSD), the company’s IT organization—turned to the company’s citizen developer platform for help.

What did we do?

We moved our content management system for managing this website away from an older version of SharePoint to a more powerful and flexible Microsoft Power App built on a Microsoft Azure SQL back end. The new system relies on Microsoft Power Automate for workflows and Microsoft Power BI for reporting.

Our decision to overhaul the legacy system was prompted by performance issues and the need for scalability and compliance.

“As the previous content management system got used more, it just couldn’t scale—it got slow, very slow,” says Tracey Peyton, a director of technical development who supports the Inside Track team. “It was really a no-brainer to go to SQL for the back end and use Power Apps for the UI with Power Automate as the workflow because the scalability and interoperability is there.”

Running legacy systems can come with a host of challenges, including performance and compliance issues. As business needs evolved, the capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform unlocked a new way to efficiently manage the content publishing system.

“After issues with the previous platform reached a peak, it became abundantly clear that it wasn’t performing how the content experience managers needed it to,” Peyton says. “The Inside Track team decided to make the leap, and the results did not disappoint.”

The Inside Track team creates content that shows IT leaders and practitioners how Microsoft uses its own technology and services to support its employees and internal business groups.

Peyton, who is on the team, has been doing web development since 1993 as a pro developer. He says that the move to Microsoft Power Platform (which includes Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate, and Microsoft Power BI) and Microsoft Azure SQL had numerous benefits that couldn’t be ignored.

The best of both worlds

On top of Microsoft Power Platform’s increased capability to scale, it’s a system that both professional and citizen developers can collaborate within because of its flexibility and capabilities.

Citizen development uses in-house talent and expertise, accelerates solution delivery, and fosters innovation. It allows organizations to respond swiftly to changing demands and customize solutions to fit each team’s needs.

By automating repetitive tasks and streamlining workflows, low-code and no-code environments like Microsoft Power Platform can significantly enhance productivity for developers and customers alike. Employees can focus on higher-value tasks while routine, time-consuming activities are streamlined.

Peyton led the vanguard for the migration to Microsoft Power Platform. He credits Microsoft Power Platform for its short ramp-up time and extensive ability to connect with other platforms. As of the writing of this blog post, premium subscriptions can connect to over 350 connectors⁠—and the list continues to grow.

“Almost out of the box, anyone can start building a customized app—with the wide variety of connectors available and the ability to leverage data and functionality from other systems, it’s straightforward,” Peyton says. “It gives you ease of access for citizen developers.”

Compliance is also an aspect that can easily outrun the abilities of a legacy system.

“Policies change much quicker than tech requirements—our move to Microsoft Power Platform allowed us to respond to policy needs much more quickly,” says Lukas Velush, a senior business program manager on the Inside Track team.

The migration from the old system to the new included:

• SharePoint data to Microsoft Azure SQL: We took the opportunity to move our data from SharePoint and Microsoft Excel to a SQL database. Most of the static data moved easily, but because the team wanted to keep the new environment in sync while tested, it used Microsoft Power Automate to sync changes with the legacy system and transform any data that needed extra attention on the new platform.
• Custom SharePoint UI to Microsoft Power Apps: To ease user transition, the team kept a similar interface with the new UI, but some controls (like multi-select combo boxes and the ability to search for multiple people across the org) didn’t work the same in Microsoft Power Apps. In these cases, the team built alternatives where needed using a customized view and low code solutions.
• Microsoft Power Automate for workflow: Because Microsoft Power Automate seamlessly integrates with the platforms the team was using, Peyton and the rest of the team had already been moving their workflows to Microsoft Power Automate. With the ability to invoke stored procedures in SQL, the team has even more options and flexibility to meet its automation needs.
• Microsoft Power BI for dashboards: This was the heaviest lift of the migration. With plenty of deprecated data in the old system, it was time to rebuild these from scratch. The team moved to shared data sources, making it easy to create multiple reports without rebuilding its datasets each time.

Flipping the switch

The development of the new system took six months.

Peyton and the team embarked on the migration first in an exploratory sense. There was much back and forth about how Microsoft Power Platform could meet the business needs without any functional loss—and with the exploration, a lot of prototyping was involved.

Months later, when it came time to complete the migration, the system only had to go offline for a few hours.

“When it was time to flip the switch, it was scary, and we were a little nervous at first,” Peyton says, explaining that they need not have worried—everything worked seamlessly. “I was really pleased with the increased performance—things were loading much quicker.”

Microsoft Power Platform enables professional developers like Peyton to accelerate their solutions. Using Adobe Analytics and Microsoft Azure SQL with Microsoft Power Platform meant that Peyton could hook up a SQL database with workflow, reporting, and a powerful front end without writing code. Professional developers have shifted to avoid building more code than necessary to reduce performance errors.

“Whereas before we had to do some wild data transformations on the previous system (the older SharePoint), we were able to step back and say that we can do this with SQL,” Peyton says. “Because of the interoperability of the Power Platform, we can move to managing data in native environments where you can get much more efficient processing.”

But, he says, there were pain points.

With Microsoft Power Platform, they did initially give up some functionality. One of those, Peyton says, was related to data sheet views.

“We lasted only a week before the people who used data sheet views said nope,” Peyton says.

The data sheet view offered the ability to make changes to multiple fields across several records directly to the underlying data without using the main form. It was only really for experienced power users. But, within hours, the team was able to build a separate Power App that provided the necessary access to the desired fields without compromising the data.

While building the UI, it was easy to keep accessibility standards in mind with the new platform capabilities.

“Having an agile or low-code environment can make it easy to push out new changes, which means your product can be in tune and responsive to updated compliance and policy updates,” Peyton says.

“There’s such a breadth of interoperability,” Peyton says. “The system allows you to focus on what you need and offload what you don’t.”

Problem-solving without the burden of technical problems

Velush says, Microsoft Power Platform “allows the people who know the business to solve business problems and not have to worry too much about technical problems.”

From being faster, easily customizable, scalable, fully compliant, and having capabilities that charm both citizen and pro developers, Microsoft Power Platform has become the answer to a legacy system that Inside Track had outgrown.

“We have the agility and flexibility to take this system wherever we want from here,” Velush says.

Creating customized views in the Power Platform, whether it’s in Power Apps, Power Automate, or Power BI, offers several significant benefits to the Inside Track team and leadership teams. These customized views enhance visibility, decision-making, and overall efficiency with the use of tailored insights, efficient data access, personalization to fit each user’s needs and role-based access to support the pillars of Microsoft’s Zero Trust security efforts.

In the early phases of development, the new system was only shared with the team via direct access, this meant members of the team had to request permission and wait for approval from the tool owner. After the system was established, it shifted to Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) to allow collaboration across Microsoft Digital.

Integrating new programs

The team sought out solutions with Power Platform to address evolving business needs. By adjusting the views of the new Power App and related dashboards, the team is able to quickly respond with custom views and tools that can handle the scale of our content portfolio.

We needed to efficiently manage content promotions across various social media platforms and ensure older stories were assessed by the subject matter experts to ensure we’re providing modern solutions to customers and employees.

The custom views based off the new system created a unified place for end-to-end promotion management. This allowed collaborators in Microsoft Digital to jump into the application with little to no experience. Collaborators could quickly see all the information needed to promote stories and track when and where a story was featured.

Auditing the content portfolio on Inside Track’s internal and external sites was a manual process for the team and took up valuable time. There are rapid changes around Microsoft and establishing a program that reviewed and worked to update stories was almost a full-time job by itself.

“We were able to rapidly build a solution that helped with a specific business problem,” says Jenny Neill, a project manager on the developer team for Inside Track. “We needed to get our arms around a large set of content that hasn’t been looked at in a long time. We needed a different lens, and it was possible to develop the requirements in a new Power App and bolt it onto the existing data structure.”

The Power Platform provided a needed solution at the right time.

“After hearing the challenges from one of the content experience managers, it was clear we needed to create a system to efficiently support the program,” Velush says. “Tracey and the developer team responded with a prototype that was already functional within the week.”

Peyton and the developer team created custom views in Power BI and a new Power App to support Inside Track in six weeks. “It was a radical improvement, our CXM was able to scale up the program and it was easy to check-in on the program with the familiar interface,” Velush says.

The success of Microsoft Power Platform, Peyton says, can ultimately be traced to the system being able to flawlessly integrate—and Microsoft’s willingness to cater to the “next level” of integration.

“Over the last few years, Microsoft has made a great effort to refocus, ensuring they provide tools to developers so that they can interoperate with any environment; it doesn’t matter what you want to integrate with, regardless of platform,” Peyton says. “They’re giving developers the tools that they need to do what they need to do.”

• Consider scalability and interoperability: When modernizing a legacy system, prioritize scalability and interoperability. Ensure that the chosen technology stack can handle increased usage over time and seamlessly integrate with other platforms and systems.
• Empower citizen and pro developers: Utilize no-code or low-code platforms like Microsoft Power Platform to empower both citizen and professional developers within your organization. These platforms allow individuals with varying levels of technical expertise to collaborate efficiently.
• Prioritize compliance and policy responsiveness: Recognize that policies can change quickly in a business environment. Choose a modernization approach that allows you to respond rapidly to policy needs while maintaining compliance with data security and regulatory requirements.
• Customize and adapt: Be prepared to customize solutions to match the specific needs of different departments or teams within your organization. Modernization efforts should offer flexibility and the ability to adapt to unique requirements.

Build professional solutions with Power Apps.

• Experience SQL innovation on Azure.
• Create a data-driven culture with BI for all.
• Discover how citizen developers use Microsoft Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

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The post Revamping a content management system at Microsoft with the Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The power of Microsoft Power Platform is that it enables us all to become citizen developers. Utilizing no-code or low-code techniques, employees are now able take control of their data and put it to work for them exactly as they need it. It’s an exciting new era, and our employees are eagerly learning how to get the most out of the platform.

Steve Carson is a senior business program manager with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience who has seen great success developing useful Microsoft Power Apps and Power BI dashboards for his team. In this Spotlight interview, we learn from his experience and hear his recommendations and best practices for upping your game to develop your own applications.

“There are four skills that are essential for the citizen developer,” Carson says. “In terms of those, there are lots of resources where you can find help and upskill: LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft community forums, YouTube videos, and your peers. Make sure you have access to a peer network because they’ll be a huge help.”

The four key citizen developer skills identified by Steve Carson. Carson also recommends that you create a record of what you’ve learned so that you can share with your peers and save time when you need to solve a similar problem.

“You might learn something and use it, and you may never use it again until six, 12, 18 months later,” Carson says. “But if you took the time to slow down and write it down, just notes for yourself about what you were doing, how you solved the problem, and paste in the code, [you’ll have an important resource to refer back to.]”

Try out our Microsoft Power Platform apps for free.

• See how we’re revamping a content management system at Microsoft with Microsoft Power Platform.
• Learn how our citizen developers used Microsoft Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.
• Find out how our Microsoft Azure sellers gain a data edge with the Microsoft Power Platform.

The post Unleashing the citizen developer in all of us with the Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Paperless contract lifecycle management (CLM) suddenly became more important during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, when schools had to go fully virtual to teach their students.

In 2020, organizations everywhere scrambled to adapt to changing conditions. The effect was especially pronounced for school systems, which needed to manage the transition to remote learning while ensuring educators and students were equipped with the tools and technology to make education at home effective. As a result, there was rapid growth in demand for professional services among educational organizations.

At the outset of the pandemic, Microsoft committed to supporting educators with training and resources to empower the transition to virtual and hybrid learning. Microsoft’s Global Training Partner (GTP) program was a cornerstone of that effort. The program represents a way for school systems around the world to find certified training partners who can support them with Microsoft tools and technology.

Microsoft’s GTP program was already active and robust, but it needed to scale alongside the rapidly expanding, pandemic-driven training needs of school systems worldwide. To accomplish that, the team needed to streamline the partner onboarding process—fast.

Previously, the process relied on paper forms like non-disclosure agreements, terms and conditions documents, and rules for collaboration—paperless CLM wasn’t something most schools were thinking about. Those hand-filled forms primarily relied on distribution by outside vendors, then headed through Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA). The process wasn’t optimal from an efficiency standpoint, and it also exposed documentation efforts to error and duplicated work.

The Modern Workplace education team started looking for an automated, paperless CLM solution.

[Find out how Microsoft is powering digital transformation with Modern Data Foundations. Learn about designing a modern data catalog to enable business insights at Microsoft. Explore how Microsoft’s modern data governance strategy is accelerating digital transformation.]

Building a paperless CLM solution

Early in their discovery process, members of Microsoft’s Modern Workplace education team and owner of the GTP program approached CELA to see if they had a process in place for streamlining partner onboarding documentation. As it happened, CELA had already been working with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience engineers on a system to facilitate paperless CLM.

The intention was to build a headless system so that teams like GTP could come and integrate with us via APIs. Other teams would then snap into our existing engine to create their own separate processes.

—Chau Nguyen, program manager, Microsoft CELA

Over the course of seven months in 2019, Microsoft’s internal engineering team had been developing a solution leveraging icertis CLM capabilities, a leader in the CLM space.

“We worked with business partners in CELA to see what the needs were, then wove in the functionality of the Icertis CLM,” says Bidyadhar Patra, a Microsoft Digital Employee Experience engineering manager partnered with CELA. “We asked what other capabilities were necessary, worked through brainstorming and analysis, then worked on design.”

Patra’s team used tools across the Microsoft Azure technology stack to create a modern, API-based CLM solution with template automation, obligation management, and workflow management capabilities. “The intention was to build a headless system so that teams like GTP could come and integrate with us via APIs,” says Chau Nguyen, program manager on the CELA team. “Other teams would then snap into our existing engine to create their own separate processes.”

Legal is a complex domain. To understand the nuances of legal terms and build a user experience that’s helpful for efficiency and compliance, it’s critical to work closely with all of our internal business partners.

—Bidyadhar Patra, engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

The solution represented an integrated tool for managing the entire contract lifecycle, from creation through signing and output. It also included an API layer to make the system serviceable across different teams within Microsoft. The tool became known internally as Intelligent Contracting as a Service (ICaaS).

Due to the complexities of compliance and contract law, as well as the unique needs of the education space, close collaboration between Microsoft Digital Employee Experience engineers and CELA’s legal professionals was essential throughout the process.

“Legal is a complex domain,” Patra says. “To understand the nuances of legal terms and build a user experience that’s helpful for efficiency and compliance, it’s critical to work closely with all of our internal business partners.”

CELA implemented ICaaS in September or 2019, just in time to support the GTP program’s pandemic-driven need for rapid scaling and onboarding. With the CLM foundation in place, the Modern Workplace education team worked alongside CELA and Microsoft Digital Employee Experience to create a system that would largely automate partner onboarding, from application to document production, distribution, and retrieval.

The GTP onboarding process is a mostly automated workflow supported by the ICaaS CLM system that requires human interaction only at essential junctures:

• Potential GTP candidates apply for the program through an external portal, where an algorithm trims unqualified applicants.
• Eligible candidates enter a customer relationship management (CRM) system for approval and governance.
• The system initiates document creation integrated with Adobe E-Sign for paperless onboarding and passes it to the candidate.
• The tool pushes signed documents through workflows specific to legal and managing teams.
• Once onboarding is complete, the system uploads the partner to the public-facing GTP catalog.
• A Microsoft Power Apps integration automatically ingests them into an exclusive GTP channel on Microsoft Teams for communication and management.
• The training partner’s identity enters a custom Microsoft Power BI dashboard for tracking and monitoring.

The system removes all human intervention except where necessary, freeing team members to spend their time and energy resolving issues or developing strategic projects. This allowed it to become less about tool management and more about program management.

The outcomes of automation

This solution has enormously impacted Microsoft’s ability to provide the professional support necessary for educators to reach students during remote and hybrid learning.

“Because we were able to do all of the back-end cleanup and automation with CRM, we’re now driving greater partner discoverability,” says one of the members of the Modern Workplace education team. “It makes it very easy for the customers to discover who their training partners are, the training topics they need, and just get connected. So we’re able to drive leads and connect customers to partners in a more refined way.”

The system is helping scale the GTP program more quickly and effectively than ever before. From a potential training partner’s application to inception into the program, the time has decreased from three months to just one week. As a result, there are now more than 500 training partners in the GTP catalog.

On average, one partner has contact with around 1,000 educators per year. With those numbers, it’s not surprising that Microsoft Teams, the primary platform for virtual and hybrid learning, has reached 100 million monthly active users in education. The Modern Workplace education team attributes much of that success to the training partners onboarded through the streamlined intake system.

The Modern Workplace education team’s work has even forged a path for other businesses within Microsoft to develop their own automated contract management solutions in conjunction with CELA. There are currently 13 individual teams tapping into the ICaaS CLM engine.

In the education space, the collaboration between Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, CELA, and the GTP program is empowering the technology and training educators need to serve students in any circumstance—whether that’s a typical school day or a global disruption.

• Explore existing solutions before creating your own tool from scratch.
• Collaboration and joint planning are essential for avoiding rework.
• Educate stakeholders about what you’re trying to achieve.
• Stay focused on what drives the best value for customers and partners.
• Tool suites tend to work together well. If you can keep your solution within one toolset, the results will be more manageable.

• Find out how Microsoft is powering digital transformation with Modern Data Foundations.
• Learn about designing a modern data catalog to enable business insights at Microsoft.
• Explore how Microsoft’s modern data governance strategy is accelerating digital transformation.

The post Shifting to paperless contract lifecycle management to help schools navigate COVID-19 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The result?

Content that previously took the company days or weeks to deliver can now be published in minutes.

Microsoft SupplierWeb is a centralized account management tool for global suppliers who do business with Microsoft. This portal is where suppliers go to stay up to date on important information, such as compliance expectations and certification requirements. SupplierWeb is also how Microsoft communicates critical announcements that impact daily activities, such as COVID-19 updates and changes to expectations for onsite presence.

“Historically, we’ve had a really difficult time getting information to our suppliers,” says Jesica Lancaster, a senior operations manager on Microsoft’s Procurement team.

Publishing content for a global audience was a time-consuming process that required a coordinated effort with the engineering team for every new message or announcement posted to the portal. This created two problems: it took time away from engineering tasks and delayed necessary communication to suppliers.

All we needed was a way to securely connect the apps.

—Wilson Reddy Gajarla, principal engineering manager, Commerce and Ecosystem team

That’s where the Microsoft Commerce and Ecosystem team comes in—it’s the organization at the company that supports the SupplierWeb application, and it had the tools needed to solve both challenges.

[Find out how Microsoft streamlined payment processes with Power Automate. Learn how to access SharePoint content using Graph API.]

Integrating collaboration tools to maximize workflow

The content managers who use the Microsoft SupplierWeb application to reach supplier audiences relied on Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams to collaborate and create the appropriate messaging. The opportunity was to use Microsoft Power Automate to manage the manual and repetitive tasks required to do this work.

“All we needed was a way to securely connect the apps,” says Wilson Reddy Gajarla, a principal engineering manager for the Commerce and Ecosystem team.

By using Microsoft Graph API, a RESTful web API that enables access to Microsoft Cloud services, the engineering team set permissions to connect Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Power Automate.

“Graph API has granular-level permission to access the SharePoint Online site, which allows secure integration with other enterprise applications,” Gajarla says.

Once an app is registered with Graph API, you can set permissions to allow web applications—in this case, Microsoft Power Automate—to access Microsoft SharePoint content.

After the initial setup is done, content managers can simply craft a message, add it to a Microsoft SharePoint list, and use Microsoft Power Automate to publish supplier content in up to 24 different languages, all without having to involve the engineering team.

Creating better outcomes with Microsoft Power Automate

Integrating collaboration tools opened a whole new world for content managers, product managers, and business partners. With Microsoft Power Automate handling the repetitive but essential tasks, Microsoft saw the following benefits:

• Content managers are no longer reliant on engineering schedules to communicate with suppliers and can respond to business needs in real time.
• Engineering time is no longer needed for repetitive, manual work, which allows engineers to focus on high-value engineering tasks.
• Business costs are reduced through a more efficient, automated process.
• Suppliers benefit from timely communication in their selected language.

The shift to Microsoft Power Automate has given teams other tools to work with as well.

With Power Automate, we have the ability to reach our audience and move at the speed of business.

—Jesica Lancaster, senior operations manager, Microsoft Procurement

Content managers can publish critical messages instantly, or they can use Microsoft Power Automate to craft future announcements, set a start and end date, and set the level of urgency based on region. Microsoft Power Automate also provides a framework that enables content managers to keep messaging current and relevant to the intended audience. That’s pivotal when it comes to getting messaging out to the company’s many suppliers.

“With Power Automate, we have the ability to reach our audience and move at the speed of business,” Lancaster says.

We leveraged Microsoft technology to automate the end-to-end flow and created business efficiencies that allow people to focus on work, not processes.

—Ashish Sayal, principal engineering manager, Commerce and Ecosystem team

In addition, Microsoft Power Automate’s ability to automatically translate content into multiple languages eliminates the need to engage translation services and ensures that the message will be conveyed clearly to a global audience.

Microsoft’s new paradigm in supplier content management

Managing supplier content was once a clunky and time-consuming operation that required significant resources for every message, and often resulted in delayed communication for vendors.

“We leveraged Microsoft technology to automate the end-to-end flow and created business efficiencies that allow people to focus on work, not processes,” says Ashish Sayal, a principal engineering manager for the Commerce and Ecosystem team. Automating repetitive, manual tasks reduced the workload, lowered operational costs, and increased consistency and reliability of Microsoft’s messaging.

Connecting and communicating with a global network of vendors is still an enormous undertaking, but by integrating Power Automate into the workflow, the Commerce and Ecosystem team transformed supplier content management into an agile, dynamic process that can move at the speed of business.

Here are five things you can do to get started with Microsoft Power Automate:

• Install Microsoft 360 and Microsoft Azure Active Directory.
• Register with Microsoft Graph API.
• Create a Microsoft Power Automate account.
• Set the appropriate permissions with Microsoft Graph API.
• Start generating content on via Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Teams.

• Learn how to access SharePoint content using Graph API.
• Find out how Microsoft streamlined payment processes with Power Automate.

The post Rethinking supplier content at Microsoft with Microsoft Power Automate appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

That’s exactly the promise of citizen development through low-code/no-code solutions augmented by AI. Throughout our organization, we’re empowering all kinds of employees—not just developers—to create their own business solutions and services using our citizen development toolkit, the Microsoft Power Platform.

Low-code/no-code puts development tools in the hands of people who aren’t technical developers or don’t have well-resourced software engineering teams.

—Lianne Zelsman, product manager, Power Platform governance

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re enabling citizen development internally by encouraging and enabling our employees to become citizen developers while also making sure we put guardrails in place to protect the company.

[Unpack how a revamped Microsoft business intelligence platform boosts data handling and builds trust. Discover powering decision making at Microsoft by analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI. Explore building a content management system at Microsoft with Microsoft Power Platform.]

The promise of citizen development

There are plenty of circumstances when someone needs a process, tool, or service to support their work but can’t access the formal engineering resources to create it. In those cases, it makes sense for our employees to build something for themselves. Historically, software developers or engineers would code their own solutions, while people without those skills were out of luck.

“Low-code/no-code puts development tools in the hands of people who aren’t technical developers or don’t have well-resourced software engineering teams,” says Lianne Zelsman, product manager in charge of Power Platform governance within Microsoft Digital. “For us, this means enabling our people in HR, Finance, and other teams to build solutions with the Power Platform. They can use it to do a whole range of things—from implementing automations to building their own apps—with very little ramp-up time or expertise.”

If you work in a large organization, you know that much of any employee’s day gets eaten up by mundane or menial tasks. Those are just the kinds of things that simple hand-made automations or apps can handle.

“We’ve seen a lot of Power Platform usage for project management teams that need to streamline their workflows or email communications,” says Bert Byerly, solution manager for Power Platform and Microsoft Fabric. “Even our developers who write code as their regular job are now using our low-code/no-code platform to spin things up quickly, like automations and alerts.”

More about the Microsoft Power Platform

At Microsoft, we believe in empowering our teams with tools that make their lives easier and their work more innovative. The Microsoft Power Platform is our low-code/no-code development solution that helps everyday employees turn great ideas into impactful tools. And because the technical professionals within Microsoft Digital have put the platform through its paces internally as Customer Zero, we’ve been able to add all kinds of features and functionality that better serve our customers.

“Power Platform comes with around 1,100 out-of-the-box connectors,” says Zohar Raz, group product manager for Power Platform governance. “This gives you the ability to build custom connectors that you can use to link up with any data source on the planet.”

We’re infusing Microsoft 365 Copilot into the platform so you can use AI to convert your natural language queries into solutions.

—Zohar Raz, group product manager, Power Platform governance

It also gives you access to a business layer called Dataverse that makes it easy for you to create and run thousands of solutions on top of your data layer.

And we’re also adding AI into the mix.

“We’re infusing Microsoft 365 Copilot into the platform so you can use AI to convert your natural language queries into solutions,” Raz says.

Giving your employees all this new richness and power is great, but we also recognize that you’ll want to govern and guide this usage. In response, we’ve made a lot of investments to give customers that kind of flexibility.

“The product gives organizations a lot of visibility and control and empowers them to determine which connectors and functionality to enable where,” Raz says.

As part of our overall technology stack, Power Platform plays very well with other Microsoft tools and platforms. That means organizations that use the Microsoft ecosystem benefit even more.

“For me, the greatest value comes from integration because Microsoft has such a wide-ranging product suite,” Zelsman says. “Building Power BI reports off of Power Platform assets, pulling SharePoint information into your Outlook, or automating reminders in Teams is really simple.”

Understanding the risks of low-code/no-code development

Along with the benefits, opening the development process to non-technical professionals presents certain risks.

“Enablement can be a double-edged sword,” says David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect with Microsoft Digital. “You’re empowering employees to be successful, but at the same time, you’re effectively creating applications that get used for business purposes without IT oversight, without security oversight, without privacy oversight—just an employee putting something together on their own.”

In deeply connected environments that have the power to extend company data outwards, that can be a dangerous situation if we don’t properly control it.

“The risk is mostly around data leaks,” Raz says. “This kind of technology works really well for good actors, but it also opens up opportunities for bad actors to find nuggets they can use to hurt the company.”

Addressing the risks through technology and governance policy

Two factors help us limit the risks associated with citizen development at Microsoft: the technology of Power Platform itself and the governance efforts of our Microsoft Digital team.

As a well-integrated piece of Microsoft technology, Power Platform gives IT a lot of control at the platform level to govern what people do in their individual apps.

—David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect, Microsoft Digital

“What Power Platform has done well for us is give us the control to lock things down tight,” Byerly says. “And then, as we look at different features or connectors and their interactions, we can start to loosen things up and create policies so they’re safe to use.”

That control is part of the core functionality of Power Platform.

”As a well-integrated piece of Microsoft technology, Power Platform gives IT a lot of control at the platform level to govern what people do in their individual apps,” Johnson says.

As a result, Power Platform enables a robust compliance strategy. Building and deploying that strategy has been a collaborative effort between Microsoft Digital’s governance professionals, the Power Platform product team, and the Microsoft Data-Loss Prevention team.

Our overall governance strategy breaks down into three sets of activities: Protect, measure, and enforce. Within this strategy, we divide our efforts between the macro-level, which sets policies for the overall tenant, and the micro-level, where individual groups within Microsoft can apply governance policies that complement our all-up guardrails.

“We’re forever finding the right balance between empowerment and safety,” Zelsman says. “So a lot of what we do is risk-based, essentially giving everything an internal risk rating, and that’s going to generate the scope of the compliance requirements any employee-developed solution will have to go through.”

That means we have to break our governance efforts down into tiers where we apply policies to employee-created solutions based on their risk profile and then channel them through permission reviews. For example, simple connectors associated with Microsoft Teams or SharePoint that operate in the Microsoft Personal Productivity environment need no permissions before pushing to production. On the other hand, a Dataverse connector built in the Microsoft Pro Dev environment requires an employee to request permission to access that environment or to change their environment before going live.

And of course, you can’t govern what you can’t see, so our teams have set up a thorough oversight apparatus to support these efforts. There’s a comprehensive tenant inventory, a reporting suite, cost and utilization monitoring, and compliance telemetry.

All of these governance policies aren’t meant to hinder citizen development, but help it move forward safely and quickly.

“Ultimately, good governance is employee empowerment with guardrails,” Johnson says.

Power Platform success stories

Thanks to our enablement and governance activities, low-code/no-code development is spreading rapidly across Microsoft. Recently, we crossed the threshold of 1 million Power Platform citizen development assets within the internal ecosystem at Microsoft—and that number continues to rise. All told, our employees have built more than 18,000 environments, 170,000 Power Apps, 50,000 Power Automate flows, and 1,200 chatbots.

But the numbers aren’t the whole story. The variety and creativity our employees have developed continues to increase.

We’re definitely looking to push this technology further. There are so many different data sources for us to analyze and so many workflows we can support.

—Bert Byerly, solution manager, Power Platform and Microsoft Fabric

Here are a couple of examples of important experiences our citizen developers have built internally at Microsoft:

• Cosmic: A revenue processing tool featuring data capture via optical character recognition (OCR), data validation through a business rules engine, and data entry using robotic process automation (RPA) that has yielded around $14.2 million annually in savings.
• AV design standards: A Real Estate and Facilities team app that helps configure AV equipment across 16,000 Microsoft conference rooms worldwide by simplifying the equipment ordering process.

And we’re only just beginning this journey. With so many connectors and the portfolio expanding every day, the possibilities are endless.

”We’re definitely looking to push this technology further,” Byerly says. “There are so many different data sources for us to analyze and so many workflows we can support.”

As this journey unfolds, we’ll continue to see Microsoft employees flexing their creativity and innovation through accessible citizen development with Power Platform.

Here are some tips for getting started with citizen development and the Power Platform at your company:

• Start with simple wins like automating approval flows to build up your users’ confidence.
• Establish some very secure baseline defaults to act as controls, then expand from there.
• Understand that your lines of business will adopt this technology on their own, so it’s best to guide their adoption through guided enablement.
• Take advantage of training material from Microsoft, especially the Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit.
• Put thought into your environment and tenant architecture, key personas, and scenarios before adoption.
• Identify the security needs and regulatory compliance that are specific to your organization and use built-in governance controls available for Dataverse for Teams and Personal Developer environments.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel: Use the open APIs and connectors that Microsoft already offers.

Try the Microsoft Power Platform at your company.

• Unpack how a revamped Microsoft business intelligence platform boosts data handling and builds trust.
• Discover powering decision making at Microsoft by analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI.
• Explore building a content management system at Microsoft with Microsoft Power Platform.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Empowerment with good governance: How our citizen developers get the most out of the Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Once you see how your idea was interpreted from requirements and provide feedback on the prototype, you have to wait again. This time it’s for the engineering team to wade through their backlogged change requests. Even the best idea can fall short, run over budget, or fail when business-focused teams are only peripherally plugged into the process of building the solutions they need to solve their business problems.

Enter citizen development.

Citizen development—the creation of business applications and features by the employees who use them—is an opportunity for business users to stretch beyond their day-to-day activities with innovative ways to improve their own business processes. Citizen development is not small groups of developers across the company creating an unmanageable amount of shadow IT applications; when done properly, it’s a mutually beneficial partnership—a win-win proposition for both business users and IT.

To show you how this works, here’s the story of how three launch program managers at Microsoft dreamed up an idea to get their work done more efficiently. They imagined an intelligent launch assistant app that would provide convenient access to quick tasks, centralize some satellite workflows, and provide more user-friendly views of their product launch data. Armed with only their business knowledge and some prior experience with HTML and design, they decided—on their own—to learn Microsoft Power Apps to try and build the app they envisioned. Power Apps turned out to be the right choice, as it was designed to give business users the tools they need to drive innovation and create new applications—with no coding skills required.

The team leveraged their expertise and, after doing some reading, Power Apps tutorials, and a little research, felt much less intimidated by the prospect of developing their own intelligent launch assistant. The launch managers had unknowingly begun their journey toward becoming citizen developers. In just over a month, they went from having an early prototype to a feature-rich application that more than a hundred other launch managers now use daily!

[Learn how to build connected business solutions with Microsoft Power Automate. Discover how to redesign business applications at Microsoft using Power Apps. Find out how to transform payroll processes with Microsoft Power Automate.]

Building an intelligent launch assistant app

The Launch team at Microsoft oversees all launches of Microsoft products and devices, including system changes and compliance projects. The launch managers, being change agents who drive consistency and process simplification, had already identified some ongoing challenges in their processes. Launch workflows spanned multiple tools, and the team needed to reference data stored in different locations to get a full view of their projects.

After deciding on key features for their proof of concept, the launch managers took part in a company hackathon to kickstart prototype development of the launch assistant app. By the end of that immersive, collaborative event, the team had built their first prototype and was feeling more confident about what they could accomplish as citizen developers using Power Apps.

Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) supports every employee and team at Microsoft—including these launch managers—by deploying and managing the products and solutions they use to get work done. That includes managing the development, governance, and lifecycle for line-of-business applications. One of our core charters is to empower users to do more. In that vein, through technology and collaboration, we support efforts like citizen development.

In MDEE, we were excited to see the progress that was made in such a short time, but we were navigating relatively new territory. While the prototype was promising, it still represented a culture shift, and we had a little trepidation about using citizen development for apps that support essential business functions.

A few factors in this project helped us decide to cautiously continue along the citizen-development path. One, the existing launch workflows and tools were still in place, so there would be no disruption of operations. And two, the citizen developers were making progress, very quickly. Their velocity was outpacing any lingering concern, and we determined that whether they created something that could be rolled out broadly, or a prototype of something we would build for them, either outcome would be a step forward.

More nimble than agile

Our engineering teams generally use agile development methods while building out apps and solutions for the different business groups at Microsoft. With discovery, development, and iterating, even in two-week sprint cycles, it can still take months for us to develop a functioning app that the business users will adopt and continue to use. No matter how much time our engineers spend with a team learning about a businesses’ processes, only a business user truly understands the context, relationships, and flow of every scenario.

As illustrated in this graphic, some of the benefits we saw while working in cooperation with the Launch team’s citizen developers included improved engineering resource allocation, reduced development backlogs, and a greatly accelerated application-building process.

In 40 days, the citizen developers released more than 250 iterations that evolved the app from an early prototype that only the citizen developers were using to a fully functioning app that has been widely adopted by the other launch managers at Microsoft. They were truly nimble. When something they built or changed didn’t come out quite right, they fixed it immediately themselves, or rolled back to a prior iteration in Power Apps and started over. They didn’t need to request a change or log a bug and wait for our engineers to resolve it during the next sprint.

The first 100 or so iterations happened very quickly—sometimes dozens in a day. However, as the app grew more complex and was being more widely adopted, the iteration cadence slowed down accordingly. As more features in the app were connecting to our Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform and the Microsoft SharePoint lists that they created to centralize the data from other workflows, it made sense to begin meeting regularly to discuss guardrails and risks before each iteration was released. The citizen developers started giving our engineers weekly demos of the prototype and talking about their planned features, providing us an opportunity to provide guidance and answer questions.

A fully functional app and a living prototype

The phone and tablet versions of the intelligent launch assistant app pulled together views of all the information pertaining to a launch, including key dates and other information about the launch manager’s project, including the risks that are managed daily.

Roughly 50 percent of the information displayed in the launch assistant home page comes from data in the Microsoft Dynamics 365-based platform that serves as the “single version of truth” for all work activities across the operations teams at Microsoft. The citizen developers enhanced the experiences of several tracking and management features that weren’t in Dynamics 365 by creating SharePoint lists as a backend for the related data. Using Microsoft Power Apps, it was easy to connect to both Dynamics 365 and the SharePoint lists to create consolidated views and tasks.

As this next graphic shows, the app experience is intuitive, and the citizen developers can continually adjust the UI to mirror more optimized versions of their business processes.

The app, now broadly available to all launch managers at Microsoft, also serves as a living prototype. Launch managers enjoy a transformed workflow, while we see the impact of new features as they are being used in the production environment. We evaluate those features and experiences before investing money in engineering resources to build or integrate them into the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform.

Lessons learned and best practices

We have spent years refining our application-development processes, and we expected to face challenges and learn new things as the traditional processes were disrupted by empowering more business-focused individuals to develop the solutions they need. This effort has been successful and educational, so we’re sharing a few of our learnings and best practices.

Partnering helps set everyone up for success

With open communication and a growth mindset, a strong partnership between the business and engineering teams is crucial in helping ensure the success of a citizen development program. For example, we learned that we didn’t start discussing risks and guardrails for each team and role soon enough. As a result, we were initially very reactionary, addressing issues as we encountered them rather than taking a more holistic approach. As we got further into the process, we were better able to determine which changes need to be monitored more closely, and to be more mindful about where test data in the production environment was being stored. In one case, we almost sent a report to executive leadership that included test data from one of our intelligent launch assistant experiments.

It’s also important to communicate early with engineers about the benefits that come with this shift in paradigm. They need to understand that citizen development isn’t intended to replace traditional development, nor does it suggest that they aren’t doing a good job. It’s just an effort to better align activities with core skillsets.

Some traditional development processes still apply

In the early phases, most of the launch assistant app users were citizen developers who could make and publish every change as a new iteration. As the user base grew, and the app features became more complex, every iteration and change required more consideration. The team moved to a role-based model in which only a few citizen developers who fully understood how the changes would impact users of the app could publish new iterations.

Not being professional developers, the citizen developers did not start keeping meticulous version notes until they realized why they were useful. More than once during the 250 iterations, they needed to roll back to a prior version after a change didn’t go as planned. Having notes that explained what changed in each iteration helped in identifying which version introduced the change.

Use Power Apps to create living prototypes that can speed engineering decisions

Citizen developers know inherently how they want to use an application within the framework of their processes, and that insight provides a high-value impact when it complements engineering’s efforts.

When business users become citizen developers and build Microsoft Power Apps solutions to address their business problems without code, it can ultimately be a benefit for engineers. We can see how a feature or functionality performs in production, how quickly users adopt it, and verify its continued use—while we plan and weigh the benefits of integration into our platform. Ultimately, when we do invest in hardening a feature for scalability, we anticipate no noticeable impacts to the user, other than performance or planned UI improvements.

Now, are you wondering how to become a citizen developer at your company? Here are some suggestions on how you can get started:

• You don’t need to wait for someone to build you a platform—with Power Apps and a little coaching from someone who’s tried it, you can define, build, and adopt a solution without the need for dedicated engineering help.
• Because you know your business so well, you can get right to building your solution—saving time and money. Your knowledge of the challenge will reduce the iterations required to transform your idea into a proven prototype.
• Read this ”What is Power Apps?” overview to get more tips on getting started and, when you’re done with that, complete our introduction.
• Find additional learning resources at Microsoft Power Platform: Learning Resources.

• Find tutorial resources in the Power Apps blog.
• Check out Power App documentation here.
• Learn how to build connected business solutions with Microsoft Power Automate.
• Find out how to transform payroll processes with Microsoft Power Automate.
• Discover how to redesign business applications at Microsoft using Power Apps.

The post Citizen developers use Microsoft Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

But how is it getting employees to analyze their data and build their own visualizations?

They’re teaching them. As the saying goes: if you teach someone to fish, you’ll feed them for a lifetime.

That’s exactly what the Enterprise 360 Data Intelligence team in Microsoft Digital had in mind when it created trainings to help teams that are analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI.

“We wanted to empower our partner teams with the skills, tools, and resources to generate and maintain their own Microsoft Power BI reports and gain access to data in a timely manner,” says Sunil Venugopal, a senior program manager on the Data Intelligence team that helped develop the Microsoft Power BI training. “This also aligns with the expectations of Enterprise 360 Data Intelligence leadership, who wanted to empower partner teams to make data-driven decisions. Once you put data into Microsoft Power BI, it tells a story for itself.”

Using Microsoft Power BI’s easily adaptable features, business users can quickly self-serve the datasets they need and build their own reports … They feel in complete control because they own and invest in it.

– Srinivas Kanamarlapudi, senior software engineer on the Data Intelligence team at Microsoft

This training was a powerful tool, especially for partner teams who wanted to gain data-driven insights that relied on the Data Intelligence team’s data visualizations and reports.

Take Tim Karel, a senior program manager who uses data visualizations to respond to system-generated issues or process changes. Karel submitted many of the dozens of requests from partner teams that were fielded by the Data Intelligence team. The Data Intelligence team would evaluate each request for feasibility, identify core metrics, find a data source, and build a data ingestion pipeline and visualization.

As a result, employees on partner teams, like Karel, could wait several weeks before receiving a data visualization or report.

“By the time I received a report, the business needs or data might have changed,” Karel says. “Our team wanted to be more proactive and use data to create a better customer experience up front.”

Now, thanks to the training developed by the Data Intelligence team, Karel is analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI. During the training, Karel and other employees on partner teams learned the basics of Microsoft Power BI and used the data team’s standard template to create their own visualizations.

“Using Microsoft Power BI’s easily adaptable features, business users can quickly self-serve the datasets they need and build their own reports,” says Srinivas Kanamarlapudi, a senior software engineer on the Data Intelligence team who was involved in creating the Microsoft Power BI training for partner teams. “This also improves their skillset, and they feel in complete control because they own and invest in it,” Kanamarlapudi says.

The initial training session drew in 80 participants, including Microsoft network engineers, software engineers, program managers, and even members of leadership who had beginner skills using Microsoft Power BI.

“Through these trainings, employees learn the best practices for analyzing data and building out reports, which creates consistency across how these reports are built and enables other teams to easily grasp the visualizations in the reports,” Kanamarlapudi says.

In addition to offering data science trainings, the Data Intelligence team encourages the employees they work with to build Microsoft Power BI reports that source data from the Microsoft Digital’s central Enterprise Data Lake, which offers a single source of trusted, connected enterprise data.

“By leveraging the shared infrastructure, we’re able to prevent duplication across multiple teams,” Venugopal says.

For employees like Karel, the training is already paying off. Data continues to be a core part of decision-making on their team and using data visualizations to track trends has become a central part of that.

“There were many philosophies about what constitutes a good customer experience, so we need data to drive impact and changes,” Karel says. “Data tells us how customers interact with agents or get support, and we’re able to make the best decisions possible for customers.”

By analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI, Karel has been able to create visualizations that identify customers who make repeat support calls and track agent utilization across product areas to see if the team needs to have more support agents during busier times of day.

“I had a fundamental understanding of my team’s data, but the training taught me how to use a reliable data source to build data reports using Microsoft Power BI, and automate it,” Karel says. “It saves me a lot of time, and it enables us to improve the customer experience.”

It’s also making a difference for the Data Intelligence team, who now have more bandwidth to support partner teams by answering questions and helping them get the most out of their data.

Colin Tang, a software engineer on the Data Intelligence team who primarily creates datasets, data reports, and dashboards for network infrastructure teams, says that it’s exciting to see teams taking the training and running with it. Tang recently worked with a partner team that manages the inventory for network parts.

“Our partner took the dataset and went ahead to build the dashboard for network device vendors, and it helps him drive conversations with vendors about cost savings,” Tang says. “It would normally take our team two to three sprints, but he built his own and they can have conversations with vendors in half the time.”

[Check out how Microsoft designed a modern data catalog to enable business insights. Learn how Microsoft enhanced its VPN performance.]

Building visualizations using Microsoft Power BI

Training has always been around, so what was different this time?

The team brought a relevant, easy-to-follow Microsoft Power BI training directly to partner teams, each with their own data needs. This made it much easier for teams analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI to scrub their data and then build appropriate visualizations.

“A lot of trainings are complicated and don’t focus on real-world scenarios that show up in the work of partner teams like mine,” Karel says. “This is one of the best trainings I’ve taken at Microsoft, and I appreciate that it’s accessible to everyone without relying on a background in engineering and software development.”

To build a community, the Data Intelligence team continues to offer office hours, where employees could ask questions or refine their visualizations. The Data Intelligence team also created a Microsoft Teams channel where employees could ask questions and share their experiences and resources. They’ve also found more success with offering trainings on the organization’s meeting-free Fridays, which are specific days set aside for employees to catch up on email or dedicate time to learning.

“We build on existing trainings and content about how to analyze data with Microsoft Power BI, which ensured that we didn’t reinvent the wheel,” Venugopal says. “Even if someone has attended trainings in the past and built dashboards, they can still learn something.”

To get the most engagement and support on a training like this one, Tang says it was helpful to take a top-down approach and get leadership buy-in from the very beginning. At the time, Tang had been conducting dozens of one-on-one sessions with partners to go over their data needs and wanted to offer something at scale.

“We went back to our leadership team and asked if we could offer Microsoft Power BI training that could reach more people at once and help them take advantage of all of its features,” Tang says.

There were many philosophies about what constitutes a good customer experience, so we need data to drive impact and changes. Data tells us how customers interact with agents or get support, and we’re able to make the best decisions possible for customers

– Tim Karel, senior program manager at Microsoft

It also helped that the team had leadership buy-in and resources to create this training which has ensured that teams have consistency in the way they construct reports and dashboards. This has improved the user experience for partner teams and the Data Intelligence team alike, and they can focus on supporting partner teams and democratizing data instead of building reports.

If you’re on the fence about building your own data visualizations using Microsoft Power BI, or creating a team-wide training, here’s Karel’s advice:

“Embrace Microsoft Power BI and other tools for building your own visualizations. And if you’re creating a data training, start by teaching the basic components and build on that.”

• Find out how Microsoft powers digital transformation with modern data foundations.
• Check out how Microsoft designed a modern data catalog to enable business insights.
• Learn how Microsoft enhanced its VPN performance.

The post Powering decision making at Microsoft by analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Alex Thiede, digital transformation lead for Microsoft in Western Europe and a former Microsoft Azure field seller based in Vienna, set out to talk to other Microsoft Azure sellers to discover how to help them serve their clients better.

For a multi-billion dollar business with more than 3,000 sellers, the potential for impact was huge.

– Alex Thiede, digital transformation lead

What emerged was a common pain point around exploding data. An enormous amount of customer data was being produced, but it was being siloed into different systems that never connected. Cloud Solution Architects (CSAs) and Microsoft Azure specialists would have to go into Microsoft Azure portals for customer data, Microsoft Dynamics 365 to track their customer engagements, and the Microsoft Account Planning Tool to manage account plans.

For Microsoft Azure sellers, whose mission is to help their clients be successful with their cloud experience, it was difficult to get a clear picture of how their accounts were performing. They were spending hours analyzing their data, running it through their own Microsoft Excel sheets and Microsoft Power BI reports, before finally sharing their insights with their account teams which required even more hours spent building Microsoft PowerPoint slides.

“For a multi-billion dollar business with more than 3,000 sellers, the potential for impact was huge,” Thiede says. “So how do you bring those teams together on the IT side to have a customer-centric view?”

Thiede realized that this was a great question to answer with a Hackathon project.

Thiede assembled a team that included data scientists, field sellers, security specialists, and Microsoft Power Platform developers who were all passionate about solving the problem. They set out to build a solution using Microsoft Power Platform while demonstrating how IT and sales teams could come together in a citizen developer approach.

Within two weeks, the team had come up with the S500 Azure Standup Cloud Cockpit, a tool that brought all the data together in a configurable dashboard that put the individual sellers in the pilot seat.

For Jochen van Wylick, a cloud solutions architect, Hackathon team member and the lead CSA for strategic accounts in the Netherlands, that meant there could finally be a real tool to replace all of the manual unofficial hacking they had been doing to try to layer data in a meaningful way.

Van Wylick showed the team how they were adding additional metadata to the dozens of engagements they were tracking in their CRM to stay organized, and they incorporated that capability in an automated way.

“I like the fact that Alex implemented these ideas in the Stand Up Cockpit,” van Wylick says. “I also like the fact that it will boost my productivity.”

[Learn how Microsoft has automated its revenue processing with Power Automate. Find out how Microsoft is monitoring end-to-end enterprise health with Azure.]

The Microsoft Power Platforms and the power of citizen development

The team wanted to enter the Hackathon competition with a viable product to wow the judges. So, they used the Microsoft Power Platform to create a low-code tool that proved the feasibility of the Stand Up Cockpit while demonstrating how sales and IT teams could innovate together using a citizen developer approach.

Collaborating across six different regions on three continents in the first all-virtual Hackathon, the IT team members built the application environment while leaving the user interface up to the sellers to customize as they wished.

Stefan Kummert, a senior business program manager for Microsoft’s Field App and Data Services team, built the cockpit’s components on Microsoft Power Platform. Kummert says the challenge was the ability to create composite models layering Microsoft Power BI data with Microsoft Azure data analysis. While this is in fact a new Microsoft Power Platform Power Apps feature slated for release sometime in November, it wasn’t available to them at the time of the Hackathon in July.

“So, we tried to remodel this concept, more or less,” Kummert says. “We factored what’s available out of the box with some other Power Platform building blocks, and that’s what gave us all the functionality we needed.”

Sellers could now integrate their data sources into a composite data model, add custom mapping and commenting, gain insights at the child and business unit levels, and more quickly identify issues and potential for optimizations that would serve their clients. At the end of the Hackathon, they had a working prototype using real customer data.

The team largely credits this agility to the citizen developer approach, which empowers non-developers to create applications using low-code platforms sanctioned by IT. “There’s often not enough time to create applications in the classic way,” Kummert says. “I think citizen dev is changing the picture significantly, giving us a fair chance to address the huge amount of change happening in the business environment.”

Microsoft’s 2020 Empower Employees hackathon category. With their win, they were awarded dedicated resources and sponsorship from Microsoft Digital.

Turning the dream into reality

Fresh off their Hackathon win, the team is now working on moving the app into production and getting it into the hands of Microsoft Azure sellers.

They’ll first roll it out to 10 customers, then another 100, and if it’s successful, it will be built into the core platform and scaled out across the Microsoft Sales Experience, MSX Insights, Microsoft Organizational Master, and Microsoft Account Planning programs.

This rapid prototyping and incremental rollout is a strategy targeting increased adoption–an approach that’s appreciated by program managers like Henry Ro, who maintains sales and marketing platforms for Microsoft Digital.

Without the Hackathon, it would have been harder to bring this team together. Rather than doing this just once a year, why not have it as a regular working style? It’s about the energy, the inclusive culture, and the people coming together who have real passion.

– Alex Thiede, digital transformation lead

“Projects like the Azure Cockpit really make it easy for our team and others to validate an idea and take it to fruition,” Ro says. “We’re excited about its capabilities and how we can enable it.”

For their part, Thiede and the team are already itching for another Hackathon–or at least more projects driven by the same kind of inspiration and agility.

“Without the Hackathon, it would have been harder to bring this team together,” Thiede says. “Rather than doing this just once a year, why not have it as a regular working style? It’s about the energy, the inclusive culture, and the people coming together who have real passion.”

• Learn how Microsoft has automated its revenue processing with Power Automate.
• Find out how Microsoft is monitoring end-to-end enterprise health with Azure.

The post Microsoft Azure sellers gain a data edge with the Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

It wasn’t.

It was led by a citizen developer.

In 2019, Microsoft employees submitted hundreds of requests to onboard new suppliers in support of the company’s worldwide professional services organization. Each supplier’s approval was made using a thorough assessment against business and compliance criteria. Until recently, these requests were submitted through a Microsoft InfoPath form hosted on Microsoft SharePoint.

“It wasn’t a pleasant experience,” says Jeff Cluff, the Microsoft Services business program manager who spearheaded the project. “It wasn’t very intuitive—there was a lot of duplicative information. The form was dull, grey, and boxy, and there was no way to tell how far along in the process you were.”

Worse, there was no visibility into the process even after submitting the form.

“That information went into one of eight different apps, and it was hard to track a particular piece of information down after the fact,” Cluff says. “There was no indication as to what the requestor was supposed to do, or what the status of the request was. You just had to wait until someone reached out and that could take weeks.”

Cluff saw an opportunity to automate the process, so he reached out to Microsoft Digital for help, and he enlisted a vendor firm to do some of the in the trenches work.

“My team and I built the platform that provides supplier management-related enterprise capabilities for Jeff’s team, among others,” says Ankita Sanghvi, a Microsoft senior software engineering manager. “We made the data Jeff and his team would need access to for this project available to them.”

While Cluff and his team—which included both citizen-developer employees and vendors from Slalom Consulting—were focused on the immediate impact, Sanghvi’s team kept the long game in mind.

While not necessarily tasked with developing or supporting custom automated solutions as part of their standard roles, the Microsoft Digital team was ready and willing to provide the support necessary to get the project access to the required data. “We worked to ensure that the project lined up with our future state, which is designed around a core principle of making connected, trusted supplier data available to all Microsoft businesses, partners, and stakeholders,” Sanghvi says.

It was all about automation and speed.

The vision was to automate the process to speed it up, give the requestors complete transparency into the process, and make it a better experience.

-Jeff Cluff, program manager, Microsoft Services

“The vision was to automate the process to speed it up, give the requestors complete transparency into the process, and make it a better experience,” Cluff says.

[Learn how Microsoft is modernizing its internal network with automation.]

Expanding project scope with the Microsoft Power Platform

Initially, Cluff simply wanted to automate as much of the process as possible.

“The idea was just to add raw horsepower,” he says.

Microsoft Power Automate was the obvious place to start, so Cluff reached out to Ashvini Sharma, a group program manager on the Microsoft Power Automate team.

“Jeff came to us with diagrams of the data flows they were trying to automate,” Sharma says. Automating wouldn’t necessarily involve replacing the old InfoPath platform, so it wasn’t in the initial plans.

But Sharma had seen this scenario play out before.

“It’s a pattern I’ve seen with other customers, where you come in with the intention of doing simple automation,” Sharma says. “Then when you look at it through the lens of the overall Power Platform, a lot of possibilities open up.”

“Ashvini’s insights shaped how we addressed the problem,” Cluff says. “Instead of just adding horsepower, we realized the potential value in looking at it more holistically.”

Why was a bigger, more expansive project not on the docket in the beginning? Resources.

“We were thinking in black and white,” Cluff says. “Either we go huge and use a ton of resources, or we just speed it up with what we had available to us.”

After Sharma demonstrated how building a completely new solution would consume minimal resources and time, Cluff was sold. The Services Supplier Onboarding Portal was born and the team built the app framework with Microsoft Power Apps, using Microsoft Power Automate for data connections, automation, and communications.

“The team built this in three months,” Cluff says. “We couldn’t have done it any other way and still come in at the pace and budget we did.”

Automation’s impact on compliance and user experience

The new Services Supplier Onboarding Portal is more user-friendly.

“Power Apps allowed us to create a single, central place to gather information and uncover that information at the right time for requestors,” Cluff says.

Requestors now see progress updates in real-time while filling out the form.

“They know exactly where they are in the process, how much time it’s going to take, and how many steps there are left,” Cluff says.

Once the request is submitted, requestors can come back to the platform to see the status of their request, and they’re automatically notified via email of any updates.

One requestor noted that the new platform is a “Huge improvement over the current manual process.” Another simply stated, “This is awesome!”

Mary Rehus, a partner manager in Business Program Management Services, agrees.

“Before this project started, this was all done in a black box,” Rehus says. “A requestor would put in a request and it would come out at the end weeks later, either approved or not approved. There was no visibility.”

This is no longer the case.

“The new process is very simple,” Rehus says. “When a request gets submitted, I get the link and I can see exactly what step the process is in, down to how many days the request was in each step of the process and who I need to ping if something’s taking too long.”

With the entire process automated, compliance also improved.

“We’re tracking every single step,” Cluff says, noting that the platform logs more than 200 data points for each record.

Even review requests are now automated. They used to take time to set up, but now an alert is automatically sent to the appropriate person.

“If we need further review, we just type a person’s name in,” Rehus says.

Cluff estimates that that efficiency will reduce meetings by about 500 hours per year.

That’s by design, of course.

“Our team’s mission is to facilitate optimal, efficient, compliant engagements with several thousand enterprise suppliers,” Sanghvi says. “This project showcases how that trusted source of data we built can be leveraged by a specific line of business solution, like Jeff’s. His team then extends the platform that we built to their specific needs.”

More freedom equals greater impact

Cluff estimates that it would take about 4,000 emails and many unnecessary meetings to accomplish the amount of work they automated. The Services Supplier Onboarding Portal—built largely in part by a citizen developer and his team—is responsible for saving Microsoft employees a ton of repetitive, manual work.

“That’s not uncommon,” Sharma says, as someone heavily involved in Microsoft’s efforts at Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which automates manual user interface flows.

Through automation, you have this throughput coming from all these employees bringing their best selves to work. If you can activate the potential within all of them by taking away all the overhead they have to deal with day-to-day, there’s an amplification effect. That’s the transformation we’re going through at Microsoft.

-Ashvini Sharma, a group program manager on the Microsoft Power Automate team.

“These people have very high value,” Sharma says. “That’s value that they could be adding to the organization by spending time doing the things they do best: making strategic decisions, making emotional connections, doing creative things. The things that humans do best, in other words.”

That’s a cumulative effect of automation culture.

“Through automation, you have this throughput coming from all these employees bringing their best selves to work,” Sharma says. “If you can activate the potential within all of them by taking away all the overhead they have to deal with day-to-day, there’s an amplification effect. That’s the transformation we’re going through at Microsoft.”

• Learn how Microsoft is modernizing its internal network with automation.

The post Solving automation challenge at Microsoft with citizen development, Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Emeric and launch leadership had to do exactly that when they set out to transform the way Microsoft launches products, something that would require acceptance from product groups that build drastically different products and services.

“Initially, there was resistance to change because people were familiar with the processes in their own silos,” Emeric says. “We encouraged employees to have a growth mindset and recognize the value for the entire company.”

Teams across Microsoft used 600 different launch types, each with their own vision, roadmap, and revenue forecast. Emeric and Brandon Ruby, a director of operations in MBO responsible for launch process, infrastructure, and analytics, knew that transforming the launch process would require a change in the people, process, and technology. But the most crucial part was adding value to the work of launch managers.

“We saw a gap in experience and productivity, and we wanted to make sure that the launch managers felt like they were a part of the process,” Ruby says.

This transformation aligned with MBO’s vision to run state-of-the-art operations.

“Our culture of innovation in Operations empowers employees to lead improvement for our customers and partners through end-to-end business process improvement and tool optimization,” says Mary Ellen Smith, the corporate vice president of MBO. “Modernizing our launch processes enables us to compliantly launch products, services, and capabilities with agility at scale.”

[Learn how Microsoft is optimizing launch management to deliver innovation to market with speed and compliance. Check out how citizen developers at Microsoft used Microsoft Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.]

The previously siloed launch process didn’t align with Microsoft’s integrated selling model that bundles products, devices, and cloud services.

“We knew putting together end-to-end solutions would be challenging if we didn’t change the way we sell,” Emeric says. “Bundled solutions are especially important for commercial and industrial scenarios where you have a range of devices, cloud services, and AI on top of what you’re trying to build.”

Additionally, compliance was also done manually in silos using spreadsheets, Microsoft PowerPoint decks, and Microsoft Word documents. Each launch manager would be responsible for knowing the latest launch rules or working with experts who could flag finance and anti-corruption risks.

This led Microsoft to create a single launch delivery process that runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform to deliver innovation with speed and compliance.  This ensures that over 200 launch managers at Microsoft have a consistent way to conduct compliance assessments of their product, service, and program launches at scale.

“Before, there was a perception that our launch process was slowing people down,” Emeric says. “In reality, offering a standardized launch process enables Microsoft to do highly complex launches and assess risks with minimal risk to the company.”

The new launch process requires a dynamic digital compliance assessment, which asks a list of questions that change as risk domain owners continuously evaluate risk categories. This is critical to consistently assess risk across the launch ecosystem. The launch team’s responses are used to determine the risk of the launch, and launch managers consult relevant risk domain owners on key risks involving finance, trade, and anti-corruption. Launch managers are then responsible for mitigating or closing risks before launching their product or service.

“Through a centralized risk management process and consultation with risk domain owners, we are much more confident that 100 percent of critical launches are managed, maintained, and meet compliance requirements before they go out the door,” Ruby says.

Built by the launch community, for the launch community

Initially, Ruby’s team focused on the process, data fields, and controls of the transformed launch process. Halfway through their journey, it was evident that the team was putting the process and digital requirements ahead of experience and productivity. Launch managers needed to be more involved in shaping the launch process that was a part of their day-to-day work.

“We found that communities, citizen development, and incubation are a great combination for creating experiences that empower the productivity of launch managers,” Ruby says.

In the summer of 2019, a team of people from MBO and Microsoft Digital participated in the Microsoft Hackathon with the goal of transforming the company’s launch process.

“This led to the creation of a citizen development program where we create rapid prototypes of value with the community,” Ruby says. “We continue to have conversations where we identify top priorities before making major investments on the platform.”

Ruby is referring to the Launch Management Excellence team, a forum among launch managers and citizen developers across the company who bring perspective from their launch portfolios. They share pain points that they’ve heard from their teammates, advise on best practices for the launch process, and provide information about upcoming trainings and events. Based on these conversations, Emeric and Ruby can return to their leadership team and share what the launch community is passionate about addressing.

“Our launch managers drive the conversation,” Emeric says. “We prioritize the needs we get in this feedback loop and address the top pain points first.”

Leading with a vision and intentional investment in your employees

Transforming the launch process with compliance by design is already paying off. It’s been exciting for Emeric to see the vision come to life.

“When it comes to transforming your launch process, it’s vital to have a clear vision about what you want your transformation to look like and have buy-in from leadership,” she says.

As this vision has come to fruition, Emeric has found that teams see MBO as a leader in launch.

“Business groups come to us for launch resources or oversight so they can ensure that they’re compliant,” Emeric says. “They’re also using our launch platform for portfolio, launch, and external risk management.”

Transforming the launch process requires intentional investment in the experience and productivity of employees. At Microsoft, the launch community and citizen development community have been central in deciding what features to add to the new process.

“You have to invest in people just as much as the process and technology,” Emeric says. “Our leadership team understood that they could have the biggest impact by empowering people with the tools they need to be productive.”

Ruby and Emeric also emphasized the importance of prioritizing progress over perfection. The team is always iterating on the launch process, and they’re willing to repivot if necessary.

“It’s a journey, and you have to start somewhere,” Ruby says. “If you anchor it in making an investment and having a shared vision, you’ll see progress.”

Emeric and Ruby recognize that the launch platform and community have grown significantly since this journey began two and a half years ago, and they hope to empower customers and partners to transform their launch processes too.

“The goal for Microsoft is to be the industry leader in how enterprises launch products and services,” Emeric says. “Our launch process is designed to uphold our commitment to trust and compliance, all while ensuring that our customers and partners have a great experience.”

• Learn how Microsoft is optimizing launch management to deliver innovation to market with speed and compliance.
• Check out how citizen developers at Microsoft used Microsoft Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.

The post Rethinking how Microsoft launches its products and services appeared first on Inside Track Blog.