From Atomic Energy to Microsoft's FastTrack: Paul Mare's Insightful Journey and Guided Tour of Dynamics 365 Implementation

Today's guest is from Munich , germany . He works at Microsoft as manager of fast-track expansion for Dynamics 365 , f&o and CE . At heart , he's a project manager who loves people and a Dynamics 365 consultant who loves making his customers business more profitable by being client-centric . He's a storyteller , an avid photographer and a performing magician .

Let's unpack that one . You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode . Welcome to the show , paul .

I did that many years ago and the journey has been good and it has been absolutely magic . I'm still enjoying it .

It was absolutely brilliant . No internet connectivity . I used to sit at the campsite , Elephants at the campsite , no fences between you and what's out there . It comes to food . I love cooking . I won't call myself a chef , but I'm active in the kitchen . I make a decent risotto . So winter food comfort food is generally going in that direction .

In the summer it's South African style . We have a brye . Now . Brye is what we call , what the Australians will call a barbecue . Probably in America as well , Brye is the local word . English-speaking South Africans also use the word brye . It's an Afrikaans word but it's similar , except I only make fire with real wood , no charcoal or anything like that .

I make a big fire . We sit around the fire , we cook together . We sit into the night chatting . We typically eat very late . Couple of cold beers on the mix . So that's my summer cooking .

That was not said to anybody at the time , but I probably wrote some of the software that helped drive that , you know .

You know , and when Microsoft came out with back then the Dynamics CRM 1.0 , no less I noticed that coming to the market was really keen to play , thought it might be a long-term interesting topic . At that point I was already a great planes partner which was part of the technology that Microsoft bought that eventually went into the FNO stack .

So I had a little bit of that history and Great Planes was bought by Microsoft just before that . At that time Microsoft were quite surprised that as a small partner I made such a strong play to be part of this thing . I managed to get two people on the airlift training in Nice in France flew them up .

They came back and said Paul , wonderful concept , but it ain't a product yet . Unfortunately that version did not get released . 1.2 went to market . I was in pre-sales on 1.2 and then I luckily didn't sell one and I found my first customer just as CRM 3.0 was coming to the market .

So I approached Microsoft say can I take my customer live on 3.0 on the day that you launch and I'll be your launch partner . They said yes , so I actually did the launch for CRM 3.0 on Microsoft behalf as a small partner , right ? They then got me into do the version for launch and the version after that .

I prepared the launch , but that was the first one that they did themselves and we did pretty well as a small CRM partner . If I roll forward a little bit , I think in about 2008, . We closed as a relatively small partner . We had the largest deals in EMEA for the entire partner channel that year . It was quite good .

One was Sun International Casinos and the other one was First Bank of Nigeria . These were two mega deals back then . So we suddenly became President Circle , inner Club , all that stuff , right , and you meet people , of course , in the process I started working more and more with Microsoft people in pre-sales on big deals that we were doing .

I was speaking at Microsoft events , et cetera . And then one day a dear colleague now although he's retired now pink me as he says Paul , do you want to come and work with Microsoft ? We have a job for you . And I said you know what ? I'm not the kind of guy that works for a 120,000 person company . I'm an entrepreneur .

I start a small company , I grow 200 people , sell it , start afresh . That was my mode . So he emails me the job spec . So I look at it and the first line says location , not specific . I go well , that's interesting . What does that mean ?

I call back and he goes well , paul , if you pick any location in Europe , it has to have a big airport in a Microsoft office . You can pick that as your work location . So I thought great three-year adventure , told my wife . We left South Africa , came to Germany . Three years went by pretty quickly .

We had great fun , not the least of all , the Microsoft share price was starting to do well , so I had to leave some money on the table if I had to leave , and really we were having great fun seeing the world . So then suddenly I had to care about my career again . I was doing presales for three years . It was like a holiday .

I love presales , by the way , but couldn't do that forever . I was put ceiling doubt , joined the Fast Track team back then and spent seven years as a Fast Track solution architect before I took over the expansion team about a year and a half ago . So that's my brief look back into the past and how I got here . Dynamics all the way .

Because I knew 1.2 came out the same year . It came out November , from memory that year , but I didn't realize 1.0 didn't go to market . I also find it interesting the comment that your colleagues made around it's a great concept but it's not ready . I get that . I totally understand that .

It was Crystal Reports who remember was a reporting engine in it back then .

And if you look at how wide the product is today , how many aspects of it Back , then in a month's time you could learn everything there is to know about the product and the experts and now I've been working with a product so many years and I have to admit that I'm a master of a few of the areas , but there's a lot of stuff that I just know a little

bit of and it's just grown that wide . Nobody knows everything anymore .

Because ultimately , you know , we've seen in the community and I've got a couple on my team Fast Track Recognized Solution Architects that's flowing to a much broader program . It's probably seen as the premium qualification that Microsoft can bestow on an individual for architecting . You know phenomenal solutions , but can you tell the story of fast track Well ?

We I'm going to take a pause there we can't say FNO in the public facing stuff right , right , okay , is it just finance now , if we ? look at that time a few years back , couple of years back , when we take the finance and operations up into the cloud and we took the Dynamics 365 customer engagement in the cloud .

The cloud is a different operating model to what we had on-premise . On-premise you do a big release , sometimes every three years , you know . In the cloud it started to happen every six months . That's a very high rate of change .

There's a lot of new innovation coming and not every part of the project of the product is at the same level of maturity at any point in time . So we were finding at that point that a lot of what fast track was doing . They came initially as the sort of mega escalation team Customers are problem , it's just gone live , there's drama , right .

What do we do In that process ? We took our best architect small team and that team would go and do a deep dive , engagement , find the problem , work with their colleagues in engineering , solve it , get that customer happy , get that customer successful . And that team grew because the demand grew .

They were doing a good job and said more and more people will reach out , and often on things that weren't burning as big as those earlier flames , but they still wanted the guidance and we saw the value . But we also saw something else Most of these firefights were avoidable .

Sometimes it happens because there's a product issue and we have to acknowledge that it happens , but sometimes it also happens because the implementation team did not follow some of the more obvious best practices , like escalation . We've just gone live , the system is not performing , so did you guys do performance testing before the go live ?

No , the customer didn't want to pay for that , right . So what happens is you incur a risk , you ignore the risk and then the risk comes to feast right , and then it does cost money to resolve .

So we changed our attack with FastTrack to say let's engage proactively in the earlier stages of an implementation project so that we avoid these last minute we're about to go live , or we've just gone live and now we have drama and now the fires are big . We still have to do that because we can't avoid all issues .

So we still fight a few escalations , but in the early days it was 80 percent escalations , 20 percent proactive guidance . Now it is 80 percent proactive guidance and we avoid many of those escalations . As a consequence . There's a few that we still need to take care of .

So that's the one brief of FastTrack Work with the partner to proactively guide the design , the architecture of the solution being put together and the governance that goes around that to ensure that we have successful delivery for the customer . So at heart we're driving customer success via the partner .

In a worst case we look like the ordered police to the partner . In the best case we bring lots of value add and we have a good sparring game between ourselves in the partner to get the best solution out there . In the end the customer is the ultimate beneficiary of a good solution . We do have another subtle brief , though .

Our second major objective is that we should gather feedback from all the projects that we engage in , curate that feedback consolidated and bring it back to our colleagues in engineering . We are already in engineering .

So our voice , if I may say , if you log something on ideasdynamicscom , you have a voice , but that voice is not that strong because you're in a big mix of voices .

If I curate a lot of feedback coming from many different partners , many different projects , and I put a position , I have a better chance of getting the program manager to say , hey , we'll put that into the project . So in our roles , and it's a proud contribution that a lot of us have made . We go that feature in the product .

I was instrumental in landing it . I brought the customer evidence for that . That was a great satisfaction for me and it's an ongoing . Key part of the journey is doing that . In a way , the FastTrack Architect to the implementation team looks like engineering , because we are baffled to engineering .

The engineering needs to cut product , so they can't talk to you the whole time . So we'll bring them in when needed and we'll talk to you in the meantime . We'll take your messaging back to them . When I go back to them , I look like the partner and the customer to them . So I'm the middleman .

I get shot from both sides but we try and balance that and nurture the relationships on both sides . That's how we are successful in the end . So that's FastTrack in a nutshell . We have limited capacity . Of course , I cannot support every project that's out there .

So now , when we look at how we support implementation guys , we started by taking the really big , really complex projects . In our terminology we'd say the ones with license revenue above 300,000K . Now , license revenue is a bad proxy for complexity .

We use money because it's easy to measure , but we really after complex and we know it's a bad proxy , by the way , but it's a way to filter and say we will support these projects are illegible . We have capacity and if I run out of capacity I can lift to 300 to 350 . Right , so I can manage my capacity .

But then and this is a lead in eventually to the portal we say but we are now cherry picking some projects and bringing good value as fast track to those projects , but actually , should we not be bringing value to everybody ? Now , you can't bring value to everybody in exactly the same way . The fast track engagement is intense .

There's an architect that works on your project with you . That's an intense engagement . But can we not work with core teams at a partner ?

If I have a large partner that plays globally , can they not establish a center of excellence and I work with them and they drive the best practices and they de-multiplex for me all the issues coming from the individual projects and give me key topics that I can engage with .

Now I have , instead of having low value conversations across many projects , I'm having high value conversations on topics we prioritize between us . How about going further down and this is your real lead into the implementation portal Is how about making it available in a self-service mode to everybody , and this is how we kind of went full journey .

So let's start with a big fast track mission , but eventually spread out to reach everybody with the best practices for implementation in one form or the other .

I think the best guidance I've ever read for a project manager about how to implement a software product right , not custom development , but a software product is coming from the Dynamics 365 implementation guide . It actually doesn't even have anything to do with dynamics yet . It's neutral . It's just project governance . But it's to the point .

And I challenge everybody do the table of content reading . Pick a topic that you have an interest in in that flip book , right ? Just scan the pages on that and you'll notice the quality is really high , right ? And so , if you think about FastTrack , we've done probably five , six , 7,000 projects in the last couple of years that we've accompanied .

We've seen a lot of things go wrong in that process , and every time you see something go wrong you learn something , and that consolidated learning is reflected in that guidance , something that seems trivial Do you have a project sponsor on your project ? Right , we all know we should have one .

You know how many projects we see that failed because of that particular thing . So now I ask the question , and some of my big partners that run good-based practice get a little bit offended when I go do you have a project sponsor on your project ? Right , and I get that .

It's not always a high-value question , but we've seen the questions are there because we've seen projects fail right Now . That's where the quantity comes in the total success by design framework , the book about the Dynamics 365 implementation . That is a tome , you're right , but you should not read it end to end .

You look at your role and I call it do table of content-based reading , right ? Yes , I'm going to come back , circle back to it later when we talk about the portal and I'm going to help you do table of content-based reading .

But this is my first recommendation If you're a project manager , if you are a functional architect that is implementing Dynamics 365 , you're going to have to go far to find a better consolidation of the key practices . That will make the difference between success and failure . It may be overkill for your smaller projects .

It's not going to be underkill for your big projects . We cover a lot right ? So , in my view and I'm biased , of course my team helped write that , yes , but I do think it's one of the best sources of guidance all up that you can find in this space , right ?

If you combine that with the technical patterns , the architectural patterns that underpin the implementation , you've got cover of all the critical aspects . Maybe business process catalog is another one that you want to do a deep dive in . So I think there are some other sources that are important , but I still treat that as one of the most important sources .

I do not expect anybody , though , to start on page one and read to page 734 , right , this is clear . Scan the table of content , pick the topic that's relevant for you now on your project , do a quick read , do a deep dive when you find something that grabs your interest , and I'd be surprised if you don't find something that grabs your interest .

Can you give me an overview of the Dynamics 365 implementation portal ? What is it ? What's it for ? How do I use it ?

So if a project is in the 100k to 300k revenue , we have one mode how we work with those 300k plus we give a dedicated architect right and then below the 100k the project of course is still important . They all add up but we don't have resources .

We are funded by the license revenue , so we're not funded really to put people in place that will deal with the bottom part of that pyramid Right . So the first thing is that the implementation portal targets the bottom two layers of that pyramid thing . What do we want to do there ?

Firstly , for me to have an ability to proactively support a partner or a customer , I need to have a sense of what you are implementing . So if I don't know your project exists , I can't help .

If I don't know that it's implementing customer service plus unified routing , I can't help because I have no context of what you're trying to achieve , If I don't know what phase you're in , because how we help is very phase dependent . When you in CE , if you start up a project , we should talk about your environment , design decisions .

You know , are you going to have one environment , multiples , global , central ? There's a whole bag that we could discuss and it's important when you , in the just before go live prepare phase , we're not having that discussion because that should have been long ago , right ? So that context I need to know what phase you are in .

I need to know what are you doing for whom ? I need visibility . How do we create visibility ? We create a portal where you can onboard your project . I can see it . You enable me to help you . That's the first thing . But if that's the only trade , you probably never on board your project on the portal because it's not all the values . What can we do more ?

I could ask you to profile your project . What is profile ? Basically describe at a more technical level . I'm implementing these products and you tick off the products . For each of these products , I'm implementing these features . It's really important for me to know I'm going live with customer service , which includes omnichannel , unified routing and first party voice .

That project sounds very difficult to different to the one that goes . I'm doing customer service , Just basic case management . We both know that's a different project . I want that insight because then I can help . Right , how do I help ? First pass , which we've released a year ago and it's out there today . You can take advantage of it now .

Once your project has a profile , we publish targeted reading , targeted guidance on the portal . What does targeted guidance mean ? We have that 700 page flipbook . I pick the bits and pieces that are relevant to the context of your project , the phase that you're in , and I hotlink to those . When you click on the tile on the portal that pops the flipbook .

It's on how to do your environment strategy , because we're in the inception phase , or later on it's on how to do performance testing , because you're preparing to go live . I take you to the relevant reading , but not only the flipbook . We have the learn site where you've got all the Microsoft documentation on Dynamics . We hotlink all those topics in .

If you're implementing unified routing , we will give you an article that tells you how to configure unified routing , how to do administration of unified routing One click and you're there because that topic should be relevant to your project . If you are implementing supply chain management and we've just released new stuff on the roadmap for supply chain management .

I put the new release wave documentation which you can read . That's another 700 page document . I take that and I hotlink the topic in that release note . That should interest you because your project is about supply chain management . That's what I call guided reading . I bring the targeted guidance for the project to you and then I allow you to dismiss .

You go , I know that stuff already Tick these and it vanishes off my screen . You go , that thing is interesting but I'm not going to read it now . I'm going to pin it so I can come back to it later . This one I'm going to read now because I want to see what it's all about . You control your own set of reading .

Everybody on the project team initially gets the same guidance , but as you start consuming the guidance , you personalize the view . If you're a functional consultant focusing on fixed assets , you focus down on product finance feature , fixed asset management , and we cut all the reading down to just that piece .

Now you have what you read to make your part of the project work . That is the reason to bring your project to the portal today . I'm going to talk about tomorrow as well , but if you do that today , this is the value we give you today .

It's the first step that we are taking towards bringing the success by design framework and the quality guidance to everybody .

You know , five years ago they just bought all the licenses up front . People don't do that anymore Now . If I use money as a proxy for complexity , we want the highly complex projects to get that top level cover right . Direct architect working with you on your project .

If you start with a hundred licenses , you don't make the cut off financially , so we don't support you , right , yes , and then in a year's time when you go big , guess what ? All the escalations come back . Because your design was never targeting the five thousand , it wasn't validated . We're good for 100 , but we're not good for five thousand .

Some firefighting again , right ? So in the profile of your project I literally ask you Are you with how many users are you starting your project ? You go hundred licenses . I do buckets because we're not interested in the exact number but the range . Right , I go a year from now , how many users do you expect to go live ? And you go a thousand .

Now I know you've got a relatively steep growth curve . Now that would say , even if the money is not there , I can calculate the complexity rating . And let's say , by the way , you also implementing first party voice . It's relatively new . Not a lot of partners know how to implement that yet .

Right , there are some potential hurdles to overcome , so you could probably do with an architect that helps you through that . That's done it before , right ? So if I see that in your project portfolio , in profile , then I can go you profile your project to say I'm doing first party voice .

I'm gonna give you an architect that knows about first party voice to walk with you on that project so I can detect and volunteer my service in future where today you need to make the money bar to get my service at the top level . Of course , here at the bottom we always gonna play .

There will be guidance on the portal for you , right , but getting that direct touch of a fast track architect is a value and we work towards that as well . The profile opens up that game for us . In fact , you will no longer be able in the near future to nominate your project . The old way .

You , as a partner , you nominate your project and say can I have fast track support please ? Right , we're gonna change that to say , please onboard your project to the portal profile it which describes it to me . I want you to go forward that you'll get the nominate button which might get your fast track architect to help you out .

And if I say no , I'm not giving you a fast track architect . After all , you've already had good guidance on that self service mode , right ? Or if you have a center of excellence in your partner organization , maybe I deal with you there and you have an indirect touch to fast track , right ?

So I see ways in which we we can take advantage of different modes of operation and change a little bit the way we engage with the market by using what we get on the portal .

So I still recommend people do it today , right , but in future I'll be bringing telemetry insights to the portal . This changes the game for a partner . Let me give you an example of telemetry . During you , a team , your team , tells you I'm doing user acceptance testing , one week goes by . Do you know whether the testing has been done ?

Do you know whether there was test coverage ? I can run on the back end telemetry against your environment and summarize the activity and go . You know , actually , only 10 records actually got touched in this week and you know that you didn't have cover or you go . You know we edited a thousand opportunities but we didn't and edit any cases .

Then you know sales is at some cover but customer service hasn't right . Or in performance testing , you forecasting to to process millions of records every day and in your performance test you tested 10,000 transactions . So what does this say ? Right , so we can bring those risks proactively to the project . If your projects live already , we will also expose them .

Today we only take projects that are in implementation on the portal , but tomorrow we'll take the ones that have already gone live and have them there because we want to bring the telemetry to those . So you have recurring batch jobs in your finance and operations environment . They suddenly stopped running . Who picks it up ? You know ?

Can the partner perhaps proactively reach out to the customer , say we noticed something is going wrong here . Can we come and check it out ? Right ? Or we detect that you're using a deprecated piece of functionality in production . Now , how about that early warning ? We're going to be taking it out in three months .

Partner , are you on top of it with your customer ? Can you propose a small work order to go take care of that , right ? Otherwise we're going to have the firefight when that hits right . Yeah , my basic strategy , by the way , is how can I enable everybody so that I avoid the firefight house ? That for a selfish motivation .

But if I can avoid the firefight , we are all happy .

Do we have everything in there and do we have risk items that we need to worry about ? So it's a really good review to do at the start of a project to see do we have an angle on everything ? In those very large projects when we have a direct architect involved , he's going to drive that process with the partner and customer .

When we come lower down into the partner and self service space , you can imagine not everybody is going to bother to run that review because you actually have to sit down and do some work . You know it doesn't happen by itself , but the value of what comes out of the other end really takes risk out of your project .

So there's an argument to be made to do these reviews and you can do them on the portal . However , I interviewed a lot of my partners on the portal and let me acknowledge what they told me . I said , paul , running a review on the portal today is like waiting through treacle .

You're asking me a thousand questions when a hundred will do , and I acknowledge that we are now working to take the same profile information where you describe your project , use it to dynamically right size the review . So now I bring you the questions that are relevant to your scenario . Now we probably six months out from landing that you know .

So probably we have to wait through some treacle for the time being , but that will fundamentally change the value proposition to our partners . So for much less effort , you can run a review and get these risks auto generated with the guidance on how to deal with them .

And one step more , I'm going to allow partners to register projects that are not real projects . They in pre-sales . Still You're hoping to waste some business . Why not already run that review ?

Now you get the risks that you need to price for on your project right , and so that in itself we want to and we're working right now on the right sizing of the reviews and bringing the reviews even to pre-sales projects for partners .

So we want to go as far left , you know , early engagement , pre-sales already During the lifetime of the project , and post-co-life with self-service telemetry . So we do a much wider span of good guidance to our customers and partners .

Ciao ?