Adopt vs Adapt: Cut Power Platform Technical Debt

00:00:01 Mark Smith
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now, let's get on with the show. Welcome back to the Power Platform Show. Today, I'm joined by James, who is joining me from Swansea in Wales in the United Kingdom. James, welcome to the show.

00:00:36 James Holland Hart
Thanks, Mark.

00:00:37 Mark Smith
Good to have you on. I remember the first time I visited Wales. It was in the middle of summer, and it was like visiting a country in the middle of winter or in New Zealand. It was equivalent to the middle of winter, and it was the middle of summer. And I'd just flown in from Portugal, to Wales. And I was like, wow, what is this for the middle of summer? This is crazy. But I love my time in Wales.

00:00:58 James Holland Hart
Yeah, a little bit different to Portugal in the summer for sure.

00:01:04 Mark Smith
Tell me about food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you?

00:01:08 James Holland Hart
Oh, my background is professionally. So I've finished uni 20 years ago this year. My previous life was a job, then a C-sharp. developer coder and then around about 2019, I think like a lot of people really just kind of come about Power Platform. Rather, I didn't have any experience with Dynamics on-prem CRM beforehand, but kind of come across Power Automate and Power Froze and Canvas apps and all the cool new world that it was. And yeah, it just kind of slowly transitioned to it over the last few years now, and now we're essentially I'm a lead developer, lead development team, using Power Platform primarily to kind of customizing Dynamics 365, but we're trying to move more into kind of using now Dynamics as it comes as much as we can and really focus on what's the power of Power Platform, so to speak. outside of that, with things like Copilot and Canvas Apps and Power Pages, and all the newer technology has come. But yeah, in a way, my passions in terms of IT and fun and stuff, like you said, is trying to apply the same background principles, thinking about, you know, agile principles and the methodologies around it and, you know, SDLC and that kind of stuff is Doesn't really, I don't see it as it needs to be too much of a different world between the low-code world and the coding world. It's just applying more human and interactive, interactive between teams, those principles to just a different technology stack, really.

00:02:56 Mark Smith
Interesting. Let me get this right, if I heard it right. You're taking a lot of Power Platform workloads and moving them into Dynamics 365 apps where they fit. Did I get that right?

00:03:11 James Holland Hart
It's just trying to see it step back from, a large focus on the technology and customizations and more kind of going back to, kind of principles from, the previous things it did in what it is we're trying to achieve rather than how we try and achieve it. Obviously, both in, you know, one comes from the other, but, you know, what are we trying to achieve and who for first? And I think a lot of that, which I'm sure today is, thinking about what we're trying to retrieve and who, and a lot of, kind of reading people who have, experienced people in Power Platform community or people who are new to it online, on LinkedIn, in conferences, Reddit and so on with that. I think there's, a focus on technology, whereas actually all what Microsoft can give you just, and just use it with maybe slight tweaks to process here and there can that can satisfy business processes. So it's taking that step back and looking at business need and use a process rather than technology first.

00:04:28 Mark Smith
Yeah. And so that obviously eliminates potentially a lot of technical debt for you as well, right? On the Power Platform, if you're maintaining all those unique solutions, apps that you've built, and now you're moving in back into a Dynamics 365 way of thinking, of course, Power Platform underpins it. So anything that there's a shortcoming, you can take advantage of the Power Platform. but you're letting Microsoft maintain that kind of core service, whether it's in marketing or customer service or something like that?

00:04:58 James Holland Hart
Absolutely that, yeah. Just kind of what, a term we're using in the department more and more is kind of adopt versus adapt. Not that one is necessarily bad or good compared to the other or the antithesis of the other, just more when to both apply in the correct circumstance, really. And sometimes something out-of-the-box, in inverted commas, isn't the right answer. And you have to actually write code or do no code or whatever the answer will buy another system, you know, whatever it may be. But it is stepping back, like you said, and it opens us up, I think, as well, to be able to take more when you've got so many, you know, new interesting things come in for more we have found technical depth, as you rightly said, is built up, the more you're restricting yourself off from these possibilities.

00:05:56 Mark Smith
So is the technical depth the biggest motivator, as into going to the core, as in the traditional, what Microsoft in the past used to call first-party apps, which are the dynamic suite of apps? Is technical debt your biggest motivator for that move? Because, I mean, statistically, 40% of whole IT spend is in remediation of technical debt. And so, and it's a high number, it's close to 50%, right? So is that your biggest motivation to allow you to get, one, access to all the features that come with a Dynamics product that you don't have to re-engineer yourself? And really, you're not restricting yourself because underlying is the power platform. So for those use cases that might not fit out-of-the-box, as you said, you can still take advantage of what you know.

00:06:43 James Holland Hart
Absolutely, yeah. It's exactly that word for what we're doing, that it's treating it as a tool, a set of tools we can use rather than the default.

00:06:56 Mark Smith
Tell me then, from a governance perspective, where does this come in?

00:07:02 James Holland Hart
I think the difficulty certainly we've seen in our organisation and I do think reading comments online that, not to say that governance isn't considered, but I think certainly in less mature organisations who have still got to go through, I suppose, the detail of what power platform and database and dynamics are and they're capable of, and they're, their cause, their cons. I think there's a lot of risk. When I think of governance, there's a lot of risk around security, storage, and licensing are the kind of three main pillars for me. I know it covers a lot of many other things, but one thing we've observed is treating Dataverse as a relational database in its purest sense, which obviously Microsoft don't aspire as a thing. It is more than that, obviously based on a common data module, but you can very easily build up, you know, your storage uses, which obviously then comes and restricts your features in the admin centre. Obviously affects, you know, if you've got restricted tables, that knocks on licensing. And I think it just, and not just at a data level, you then kind of take that principle and apply it to building a lot of cloud flows or canvas apps. So, whatever customizations you may be doing, it's all just like building and building. And I think the end result we've seen is that it's actually, even with all best intentions, it's really difficult to then stay on top of things like the Wave releases. And even to a degree where your solutions, even if they're well segmented and designed and there's not too many of them, you're then still blocked by Microsoft changes because you've got so many links to the tables within CE or one of the other modules. because funny enough, we've got, a few times we've come across an issue of the apps not being where the apps in the admin centre not being aligned and the packages within them, which obviously we can perform manual updates on, but then that's the end of what you can perform. And then that's what I have done. You then got reactive support with Microsoft Evolved to keep that up to date. So I know that's like the extreme end of it, where then you're essentially locked out your own system, but It's more to be governance to me means more preventative. And being, I know it can be a reactive thing in terms of support, but on the scale, it's far more of a proactive thing to me to ensure, sustainability, cost savings and just making the platform as efficient as it can be really. And I think there's, a certain lack of awareness, as I say, with less mature organizations or specialists and individuals of how important that is off the bat.

00:10:32 Mark Smith
Yeah. I just want to get some context. What's your user base size and what you've got deployed at the moment?

00:10:42 James Holland Hart
So there's two organisations that I've worked for that have utilised power platform at all. My previous one was universities, so that's the data within Dataverse or at the time was on-prem dynamics. would be used by students for applying for courses and those kinds of things and student records, but was primarily directly used via Dynamics or any sort of power platform based front end would primarily be staff. Now I work in a membership organisation. It's primarily a trade union, but we've got other arms to the organisation. It's far more of a mix of both. So we're roughly, it's one of the largest trade dealers in the UK, roughly about 500,000 members. It's a lot from that perspective. And staff around 1000 to 1500 staff, so you know, a lot of insignificant amount of people. But you know, what they do is a variety of things internally, like kind of, you know, when we need to represent members for advice and those kinds of things. it's that type of typical, day-to-day trade union work. It's managing their memberships. It could be taking donations, you know, a myriad of different functional, you know, areas, I suppose. But then also we've got the members needing to access their information themselves or, apply, maybe apply for certain grants or get rep with the other on the receiving end of the representation. So how that comes in is actually quite a complex technical question, really, because they wouldn't use dynamics externally, but then the answer to that could be a variety of mobile apps or power pages or traditional website design or a type of CMS for websites. So it's really trying to think cross-functional really and why me personally go back to the start of our chat and why as a technical department we're really trying to step back and think what is it we're trying to achieve and who for because going straight to technology and maybe build first or for purchasing something or using something like customer service, like you said, may or may not necessarily be the answer without knowing. I suppose your journey, thinking about things like user experience as a journey principle is trying to base a lot of things around that maybe?

00:13:28 Mark Smith
So I want to understand your experience over the last seven to eight years, because you went from a deeply dev background into low code and the configuration, which a lot of devs, in my experience, found, particularly from a.NET background, found a little restrictive to start with, as in going to a more configure type of experience rather than build from code. And now I feel like we've gone full loop in that what AI is allowing us to do is do a lot more code development and get outcomes quicker. For you, what has that been? what are the highlights and what are the takeaways, I suppose, that you would pass on to others in that journey?

00:14:12 James Holland Hart
Well, it's really interesting when I come into it, it's primarily cloud flows pretty much. There was very little else kind of based off more M365 tools like say Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive and so on. Just for really like small little automations and processes for people, not wide scale like departmental processes that in the past, as I say, probably would have been deep in the coding world. So in a way, my introduction was so to speak, I suppose, that kind of traditional low code. In the sense of view, it wasn't trying to replace these big monolithic processes or systems. I found it visually and conceptually quite confusing, not necessarily restrictive in terms of cloud flows, just confusing just in terms of, because it's so visual, Certainly, how do I relate the principles I've done for 15 years or so? Things like, single responsibility for methods and looping and conditioning, all that kind of core stuff. And I think that was just more a matter of time than anything. And going through, I know the Microsoft Learning certifications are taking quite a big change now. But at the time I was, speaking to people online or people I worked with, they wanted to know more. I was quite keen on expressing look at things like Pl. 900, 100, 200 and so on, because there was, for me, just reading, and I didn't do classes, just reading through them and using that to learn more, but also practice it in reality. Like I think that is what kind of gave me the foundation to be able to properly transition over into like a full-time job in it. But I think once I got used to it, actually it came quite naturally thinking about those principles, certainly from a deep coding angle, things like applied to each is essentially a follow up. And it took to the degree, like a flow conceptually kind of be like a method in a class, but to the point where almost, and I've never known if this is actually the case, at almost cloud flows at a front end to probably some C# code that's running on server behind the scenes. I don't know, that's a very kind of, you know, focused way, I suppose I thought about it, but then it seems so obvious. Obviously, it's calling APIs behind the scenes and so on. And I think it's allowed them to realize what what's possible with it. As you said, it's not the same thing as code, but it's not meant to be. It's, if there was a requirement for, say a big HR system that was so custom, it needed a lot of thought, a lot of, developer work on it. Would my suggestion be Power Platform and Dynamics? Probably not. It would be some sort of coding language, obviously, with as they were coming into that with hosting and things. But yeah, I think it's got its place. It just depends on the kind of circumstance, really.

00:17:57 Mark Smith
Yeah. So the latter part of that question is now looping into a world where We can use agents in GitHub and direct in VS Code and Visual Studio that allow the writing of a lot of code at a phenomenal speed, as well as the ability to validate, check, follow, standardized, proven, I suppose, ways of development, including things like DevOps, CI/CD. The entire process now is well-documented in software development. And we can create agents that do each of the individual roles in a software development lifecycle, either from scoping requirements up front to architecting a potential solution, being another agent role to another agent role being the coding role, to then your QA and making sure that all your code testing, et cetera, can be done into release pipelines and ultimately through the documentation and et cetera, can all be done by individual discrete agents that do handoffs, et cetera. And so it allows us to do and build a lot more than ever before. How are you thinking about that now in context of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform in what you're building, maintaining over time?

00:19:21 James Holland Hart
I think as far as copilot and agents are concerned, I think in terms of power platform dynamics and data verse, personally, I think I'm more thinking of it from a usage perspective in terms of the end user. Because they've got things like the form assist to, I forget what it was called a few years, maybe AI builder where you could scan a document and it'll fill, you know, fill things in for you. And all of that stuff is just, obviously, as long as it's kind of trained and it's given the right information, can speed up processes, no end, and obviously that time a person is spending could be spent on other far more valuable tasks. And obviously, Power Virtual Agents, as it was known, back in the day, that now is supplemented with knowledge that you can feed it. But it's all evolved from a core that was there a few years ago anyway. But I think in terms of us on the technical side, I do think there's still a level of maturity that we need to get to within Power Platform before copilot and agents can really shine, I suppose. And it's not, I know one use, kind of useful usage of seeing as in cloud flows and it can sometimes not always, determine maybe errors that you're getting if your flow is failing or why you can't, you know, maybe you've got a form level isn't functioning correctly and so on. And that's great. But in terms of fixing things or generating things. I'm mentally not quite there yet, but I think there's bigger things, at least at the moment, that can be impactful, like, Git integration and so on, where we can't yet apply a lot of SDLC principles to Power Platform. like you say, you mentioned get the integration because you've got the whole premise of how do you parallel work, is that multiple environments? Then you've got the difficulty of how do you make your changes and so on. But even a lot of that still comes back to the core, I suppose, what we're just talking about of what does Power Platform mean really and what is it there for? How does it sit alongside the traditional coding world and how do they complement each other in a sustainable way. Going back to your question about governance, I think it all, I think it can encompass a lot of that really. And I think once those fundamentals have matured in the power platform, can have these options and ways of utilizing it and not to kind of then is a risk then of jumping, okay, you could customize too much. Again, problems we talked about with technical debt, but customizing configure in a sustainable and governable way that is as easy and low risk as code. I think we're in this kind of funny transition phase of Microsoft seem to do want tomake it that, make it, it's never going to be like code, but it'd be as close as it can be from, a principled perspective. And I think then you've got, when agents come in, you know, there's more robustness and less risk and so on from there then. So we're trying to kind of take it piece by piece and not jump into the deep end, I suppose.

00:23:13 Mark Smith
Yeah, As you look towards the end of, because we're almost halfway through now, 2026, what about what Microsoft is doing in the Dynamics 365 space excites you the most and what you look forward to working with more or doing more of? Yeah, what's the outlook for you?

00:23:38 James Holland Hart
I think to a degree, copilot ice. not to appear cynical, but I think it's an incredibly, generative AI amongst, I think it's important that the game industry needs to really, the media around it actually need to really differentiate the different types of AI, not to label everything essentially as what generative AI is, which is very different to manually created chatbots in Cobalt Studio, for example. But I think that is interesting, but it's got a way to go. I think Microsoft have, they've gone clearly very deep on it, but I do worry how governable is it. We are once, once you've really got your teeth into it, but I think on the other side, the more they're committing to things like Power FX actually is one of the things that I think could be Revolutionary, but not in the sense of a language. It is just a language at the end of the day. But what it is thinking around the front end of dynamically canvas apps or whatever it may be, Power Pages, that there's so many conflicting both technically and from a principles perspective. That can do somewhat of the similar things, but then also cause technical conflict that, like business rules and JavaScript, for example, can really **** heads and overrun each other, which do you use, which is more appropriate, which is more supportable and debuggable and so on. But I, and obviously you've got, you know, plugins as well. And I went to the European conference a couple of years ago and Watch some demos around Power FX, and at the time the automated plugins were still in public preview, and I think that I forget the deprioritized, I think they're calling it now, which is necessarily that they fully descoped them, but this kind of on the back burner. And I hope they do become a full thing, because we've already started to use functions, as they're called, and running from cloud flows at the moment, just to do really simple like string, like string manipulation of e-mail addresses, for example, really simple, but actually it's so fast. And that's completely, and I think that's the point back to the coding principles. It's totally reusable wherever we may need this, wherever that perfect function is callable from. But I think I really, really hope they get back to work on the automated plug-ins, because that's potential that night. Funnily enough, in the conference, I spoke, and he's not at Microsoft anymore, Mike Bisani, and asked the difficult question of, Oh, is the aim for this to replace coded plug-ins? Because the intention was that it could plug into all 5 stages of the execution life cycle, pre-operation, operation, and post-op. You kind of give a vague answer to that, but the impression was not that they were going to do that, but certainly it would have the capability to do a lot of the same things. So I'd be really excited to see where they go with that. And I think it could, whether it would get to the point it could replace coded plugins and business rules, JavaScript, I imagine not, but There's a lot of capability potentially with power effects of how they're using it as a language rather than language itself.

00:27:30 Mark Smith
Yeah. James, it's been super awesome talking to you and hearing about the interesting transition, particularly from the Power Platform to Dynamics. That surprised me, but it totally makes sense as well. So yeah, thank you for sharing.

00:27:48 James Holland Hart
Oh, well, problem is, I think it's really interesting looking. back to that time, how many similarities there are really. And I think it's more what is achievable in Power Platform is more a limitation of the technology rather than the people.

00:28:07 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Business Application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffee.com forward slash nz365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.