5 Years of Fun and Change

It was five years ago when I joined Theta to create a brand new CRM Practice in October 2015.

Looking at the application Microsoft Dynamics 365 today and comparing it to the system we had available in October 2015 it is incredible to consider the advancements we have witnessed. There has been a radical change to the landscape into which I launched the new practice.

At that time there was Microsoft Dynamics CRM on premise and Microsoft Dynamics 365 online and many organizations were moving from on premise to online.

I am very proud of the team that we have assembled at Theta. These really smart people have injected enthusiasm have been flexible, adaptable and take the changes that are encountered in their stride.

There are now 2 upgrades every year and typically the release notes document we need to digest is in excess of 300 pages for Microsoft Dynamics 365 in general.

Here is a small list of some of some of the changes to the product that we knew as Microsoft CRM that have been introduced since October 2015. For the sake of brevity I have restricted my list to 15 items, and am just skimming the surface.

• Logic Apps was introduced in 2016 and this revolutionized how we could do integration to this platform
• CSP for Licensing was introduced making licensing easier
• Power BI integration has been updated and has become the norm for advanced reporting
• The consolidation of Dynamics 365 overall has continued with many new products and services added
• The Power Platform was introduced with the CDS
• A completely new User Interface was released for the application
• The retiring of the term “CRM” occurred at Microsoft, to be replaced with Customer Engagement
• Microsoft bought ADX Studio and incorporated the Portal into the platform
• A new Power Apps Portal was introduced with Model and Canvass driven apps that can be created using Power Apps
• Microsoft bought LinkedIn and simplified connectivity between these applications was established
• A new Marketing application was released last year together with an Event Portal
• Project Service Automation was released and then withdrawn and has been released again
• The IoT has been integrated into the Dynamics application
• Power Automate was introduced, this is a game changer for business automation and a whole new way of working with Workflow
• Customer Insights and AI have been included in the application

And

• Microsoft incorporated Field Service into the application which came from an acquisition of FieldOne.

This Field Service offering is very significant, as I heard someone once saying about the acquisition, “For every sales person out there selling products (The traditional market for CRM) there are nine other people out there, repairing things, installing things, inspecting things and generally doing work”. Therefore an application that addresses a larger slice of the market can only be considered to be a good thing.

And amid all of the change and fantastic new things we have had to adapt to, along came Covid-19, changing our working arrangements and adding a whole new perspective to collaboration.

If someone had told me in 2015 that we would do a large CRM rollout to 160 users with all of our staff and all of the customer staff working from home, I would probably have asked them had they taken leave of their senses. We can adapt and we have to, the constant change keeps us on our feet and nimble.

So did I expect in October 2015 to be implementing Field Service systems to help organisations manage work and assets, conduct inspections etc. and with the system wired up to “Internet of Things” IoT devices? Probably not. I expected change, but not at the pace that it happened. Am I excited to be doing this kind of work? Absolutely.

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Maybe I’ll watch Back to the Future again this weekend.

That “Ah-ha”moment

That “Ah-ha” moment happened when I saw Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service and Project Service working together harmoniously, It really made it come to life when we added some real data to the system for the first time.

I had seen and configured each of these components separately, but this was the first time we had configured them to work together.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service and Project Service are natural bedfellows. Often a business will create a project and the project itself will spawn multiple work orders. In order to really understand the complexities of anything, you often need to dig in and have a look at the lower level processes and detail, and view the whole process with real data.

Take for example an imaginary project that has been set up to replace all the old street lamps in a city precinct with a new range of eco-friendly lights.

The whole scope of work would be deemed a project. However the implementations through the various streets and shorelines would each be easily considered work orders or specific pieces of work to be undertaken by various teams or be termed a work breakdown structure.

Therefore there is a natural overlap between the field service component – i.e. the staff who will be on the ground physically removing the old lamp posts and replacing them with new ones – and the overall project, the project budget and the project service level agreement and reporting on progress so far.

There are natural dependencies in that the team who remove the existing lamp poles needs to be followed quite closely by the new team who are replacing these lights, and each of these teams may have separate reporting lines.

An electrician probably needs to be first on the scene to switch off the power or to ensure that the power has been isolated safely and the electrician may ultimately be a member of a different project team to the team performing the physical work as they all have different tasks.

However all the personnel will be responsible for capturing their time on a regular basis. The electrician probably of a shorter duration and the removal and excavation team considerably more. This also applies to the new light pole implementation team and then the electrician returning to the new installation to connect up the power and switch it back on.

There will need to be some element of Health and Safety and or traffic management to keep the team safe as well as protecting the members of the public from possible falling lamp posts. This all needs to be planned, then recorded and should there be a mishap, adequate capabilities in place to remediate such eventualities.

This scenario depicted above, although very simple, has a large number of working parts and components that are all tied up with the joint concept of field service and project service, this needs to extend to the mobile application used by the teams.

Obviously this example can be likened to many businesses performing various project tasks. Consider that for each of the items on this simple flowchart, it could be necessary to change a status, update a time spent, make notes about what was right or wrong. Then from a reporting perspective, the completion of this Work Order for the lights in this precinct would show as complete, but would only show as a task completed on the overall project.

The different components activities and collected data all form a malleable information source that can be reported upon and ideally shown in some form of business intelligence dashboard with highlights and indicators to ensure that corrective actions can be undertaken if things are getting off track.

When you see all of this working together harmoniously within the one system, like me you may also get the “Ah ha” moment.