Microsoft Keynote – day 2
Day two started with the amazing Cecilia Flombaum, talking about the Microsoft business process applications solution available to us as partners. She talked a lot about the value of introducing clients to Business Central initially, and then explaining the value of rest of the Microsoft stack to them as a natural ongoing conversation.
“With our tech and your expertise, we have a powerful solution available to customers.”
Read the Day one blogs here – marketing focus, technical focus.
QBS Marketplace
I went along to this session as I was really interested to learn a bit more. In a nutshell, QBS have a new project that has recently been launched to assist their partners with any extensions that have been added to the Appsource.
Successful project management and clients
This session was delivered by Frank “with the big balls” – a joke from the earlier keynote session. You had to be there. He basically spoke about ways to ensure project success and the key factors required to achieve this:
- Buy in from all stakeholders – this may sound obvious, but if the CEO or project sponsor is not behind the project, it simply won’t succeed.
- Project champions – make sure you have someone client side who is key to driving the project forward.
- Honesty and the “nice guy” – being the nice guy can sometimes pay dividends. Offer to assist with reporting to upline managers. That way the correct message will be delivered and the client resource gains extra time in their diary. Win-win.
- Project marketing/communication – keep everyone involved updated with what’s going on, good news and bad.
Partner experience of project success – an interactive session
Another great session led by Guss Krabbenborg. But this time with added audience participation by getting the audience to use menti.com when answering questions – an interactive online questions answering tool. I think it was a great way to keep us involved, and I’m definitely going to be using it at the next client day event we hold. We were also asked to speak with our neighbours about the top three things we believed were key to project success…. We decided on:
- Buy in from all stakeholders
- The Partners specific skills and experience
- Understanding of customer needs
We then heard from the four Partners on the panel as the audience provided their answers to the various questions posed. Guus made a very valid point that most people who are looking to buy ERP are new to this kind of purchase, and that it is rare to find anyone other than an interim consultant who has implemented an ERP solution multiple times. This being the case, as Partners it is up to us to set the ground rules and help educate the customer as to what is required to ensure successful implementation and on-boarding.
But new software is not enough to ensure project success. People, technology, and process combined will ensure success, and a willingness for an organisation to be open to change. Ultimately an ERP implementation affects an entire organisation, so it is also an enormous change management project.
Regional Session UK
The final session of the day, before we were due to head off to the conference party, was led by Rob Pope from Microsoft UK. He presented some amazing growth figures for Dynamics and customer adds in the UK. But despite these great results, there is still an opportunity for further growth that can be had in three distinct ways as per the image below.
We watched a short video from Liz Leigh-Bowler who was unable to attend. The TVision team had already met her face-to-face when she visited the TVision offices the previous week.
Rob then introduced Will McIntee who summarised a long long list of “Go Do’s”, and so many of us in the room instantly took a snapshot of the list. Will then showed a slide of Partners who were at the forefront of verticalising and packaging IP in Business Central in the UK. TVision made the cut! There was a screenshot of the Bevica website – on a massive screen. First Sharka, and now Will using our website as an example of best practice service delivery.
Last up was the special guest we had been promised. Marco Perisic joined Rob to speak about his recent projects since moving on from Microsoft and the Dynamics channel. In a shrewd move, he said he was there to offer the services of his new employer, a payroll and benefits provider that integrates with BC.
