The Secret Behind FastTrack’s 2.2x Higher Adoption Rates

Mark Smith: 0:14
Welcome to the Co-Pilot Show where I interview Microsoft staff innovating with AI. I hope you will find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode, we'll be focusing on Success by Design Framework and how that is part of the FastTrack program within Microsoft. Today's guests are from Portugal and the United Kingdom. They both work at Microsoft as principal program managers. You can find links to their bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Pedro and Alok.

Pedro Sacramento : 0:53
Thank you, Mark.

Mark Smith: 0:54
Sure Good to have you on. My opening question for everybody is food, family and fun the three Fs. What do they mean to you, mark? Sure Good to have you on. I always my opening question for everybody is food, family and fun the three Fs. What do they mean to you, pedro?

Pedro Sacramento : 1:02
Family means everything to me, and you can see them right there, I think. So that's my family, my wife and my two kids, my two daughters. I'm from Portugal, so it's something that is really important to me and fun, of course. That's what we do with family outside of the work. Nice, and to your portuguese tarts oh, put your starts yeah, of course, of course, yeah, yeah you know, they're never as good.

Mark Smith: 1:29
I've had them all over the world and they're never as good as in portugal.

Pedro Sacramento : 1:33
Yeah, you cannot get close to what we have here. You might try, they might try, but you cannot get close. That's true.

Mark Smith: 1:40
The reason I went to Portugal is because I love port and to spend time in those port caves, those wine caves in Porto. Man, just amazing. I'm building a new house and the back area of my house is modeled on one of the caves that we went to. They had this outdoor area and I'm modeling the whole very large pergola with grapevines growing up every post as part of it. So, yeah, I love Portugal. I could live in Porto. I think I was there for the Festival of St Jao and I will never forget that full, full night experience that the Portuguese provide, and having garlic flowers put in my face and hit on the head with a hammer Just the pure joy of everybody, young and old, was a fantastic experience. Alok, tell us about you.

Alok Singh: 2:34
Well, first thing is I need to go to Portugal. That's been on my path, but I haven't done that. So for sure I mean again. I'm married with two kids, my wife and me. We moved to the UK almost been 10 years now, wow. And then, yeah, both my daughters were born here. I have a seven-year-old and a two-year-old, and I think a lot of fun revolves around them and you know, honestly, they're the center of everything that we do. When it comes to food, I mean, obviously, I do love my chicken, tikka masala and all the biryani, that you can get some great food here in the UK, and Indian food is lovely here as well. I do love my fish and chips in Wellington. So for sure, yeah, I would call myself a foodie, I feel, in London.

Mark Smith: 3:22
are you based in London?

Alok Singh: 3:23
Just around London area west of London between Reading and London, if you will.

Mark Smith: 3:27
Ah, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I found in London, in South London, you got the best Indian food. Interesting, that was my experience. I went out there at one point to visit a friend of mine who was a doctor and working at a hospital out there and she took us out for indian food there and I was living in west hampstead and we, you know, had a couple of you know curry shops and stuff, but nothing was the food down there, and the restaurant we particularly, was just jammed wall to wall, people coming and going and just absolutely tasty, amazing food. I just pushed my two-year-old out the door for this podcast, like Papa, why can't I stay? You can't stay, so I know having young kids. Tell me about the origins of the Fast Track program.

Alok Singh: 4:14
It's interesting because it was almost a decade ago and wasn't called FastTrack at the time. Right, what was it called? It was the SA team, a solution architects team, and our history with naming has been a bit interesting, so we just called it a group of solution architects. And if you look at it within any product group or engineering organization, you have people focused on building the product, your core engineering team, development teams. You have the product managers who are setting the direction, deciding on what needs to be built into the product, and these solution architects were not doing both of those things but essentially were sitting at the periphery of the engineering organizations and plugging into some of our largest, most complex implementations that we were seeing around the globe.

Alok Singh: 5:02
And, to be honest, in the early stages this was a lot to do with firefighting, going and addressing the challenges. The whole cloud thing was new as well, so a lot of these customers were actually first time implementing in cloud, which means there was a lot of surprise, the sense of loss of control, and a big part of the job that the solution architect team did was going and putting off these fires right, dealing with exact level escalation. So it kind of started from there, it from there and, interestingly, what the solution architects observed is 80% of the problems that they were seeing on these projects, which, in many cases, you know took weeks and months to resolve and you know they would go in as the heroes and save the day. But it took longer than a day and they realized that 80% of these things are actually totally avoidable If we were able to set some of the directional aspects of the implementation early on, better aligned to what the product is designed to do or, in a way, it's meant to be used as well.

Alok Singh: 6:08
So there were lots of learnings from these firefighting escalation situations and that's what led us to almost mature this engagement model, to say that what we don't want to be in this firefighting business, what we are going to do, is find a way to engage early on in these projects and guide the implementation teams to success.

Alok Singh: 6:38
So that was almost the early origins of FastTrack, but we learned quite a few things. It had to do with maybe, you know, just getting ready for the cloud itself, the mindset, because a lot of these implementation teams or developers were coming from a custom app dev, which means when they looked at a SaaS product or a service, they were thinking I'm still going to do my custom app dev, but if my feature requirement exactly matches what it offers, then I'll probably use that. So it was SaaS, but still in many ways a custom app dev. So yeah, there are a lot of challenges and I think it had to do with the approach to implementation in many cases. I think that I would say would be the origins of FastTrack somewhere eight or nine years back now.

Mark Smith: 7:13
Yeah, and success by design framework. How does that interact with the fast track program?

Alok Singh: 7:20
Yeah, I'll also let Pedro come in and share a few things. But when we started off essentially as the team of architects, we were working on these and we created this shared space. We are keeping track of the things that we were recording as learnings right On this project. I saw this and this was the thing that we could have done right, and that shared Excel essentially became, you know, a set of learnings that we learned from, you know maybe hundreds of projects at the time, and I think it was James Phillips at the time who started giving it a name Success by Design, but kind of Success by Design started in the form of a shared Excel before.

Alok Singh: 7:56
Success by Design, but kind of Success by Design started in the form of a shared Excel before Success by Design, if you will. But the crux of it was what we are learning from these projects. You know, where are the patterns, anti-patterns, how we should avoid that maybe in the next project, and then also understanding from a product perspective what can we improve to make sure that our customers and partners are not running into those challenges? So there were two sides of the equation. One was, you know, guidance and direction, best practices on the implementation projects to our partners and customers, but also, on the other side, bringing that back into our engineering and product teams as well. I think that was super fundamental to improve the overall maturity of the product and how we guide our partners to go and implement it as well.

Mark Smith: 8:44
So as an internal team, as a success to my design as internal Microsoft engineers and their experience on these projects, and then out of that grew FastTrack. Prior to cloud, we had on-prem and we had a framework similar called dynamics 365, surestep and did any artifacts or because that used to be a massive library of templates. You know you'd have your fit gap analysis documentation, you would have know your scoping documents, you'd have your architectural documents, a whole range of library of assets. Back in the day Is this the natural iteration of what that was, an on-prem world kind of tooling. And then we now in the fast track, with success by design being the cloud equivalent.

Alok Singh: 9:35
I think it's interesting because when we started off with this, it wasn't really for us an evolution of show step. It was, I would say, not a theoretical or an academic exercise, but really the things that we were just seeing on the ground and almost sharing with each other that this is where we can go and avoid these specific challenges or how do we shape the work that the implementation team is doing. So I wouldn't say that success by design is an evolution of what we had from a ShareStep perspective, but also ShareStep or the methodologies that our partners used. That had evolved significantly and I think every partner had a different way of doing it, their own kind of flavor of methodology, and going and trying to impose a new methodology we didn't think was the right thing and wasn't even necessary to drive the success that we were looking for.

Mark Smith: 10:26
If we look at FastTrack now and we're what? Nine, 10 years on, how many projects are potentially and I know you might not have an exact figure representing this data set now, like, in other words, and the reason I asked last time, I heard I don't know how long ago this is about 30,000 projects have fed into the body of work that makes up Success by Design and the Fast Track program. Is that kind of still a representative number, or is it higher?

Alok Singh: 10:58
Is that kind of still a representative number or is it higher? Yeah, I think and I don't know when we started kind of counting on some of these programs were formalized, but at least from the time that I've been in the team and we formally announced, you know, success by Design, our implementation guides and frameworks etc. We have over 8,000 to 10,000 projects for sure that have gone live with FastTrack and have adopted Success by Design. That's the number that I've seen.

Pedro Sacramento : 11:23
And those might be more. Sorry, mark, just to say one thing when we step of engagement, it was one to many. There was one FastTrack solution architect working with many customers, but since then we've onboarded partners. So I think that Al was mentioning that we have now 120 partners and they are also using or leveraging Success by Design framework with their customers. So if you just imagine the scale of it, right? So now it's not one fast track solution architect working with many customers, it's also partners working with all of their customers, right, which kind of grows those numbers by a lot.

Mark Smith: 11:56
Yeah, yeah For sure. You know there's been a stat round and I can trace back. There's an academic report that's been done on it and it's only top of mind for me because I'm currently writing a book on project failures and, well, how to make projects successful more to the point. But there's a stat around 70% of all software projects fail because of not having a kind of well one. User adoption is a big part of it, but really not having a framework around. Have you noticed that? You know, with the program being in place, that that number has turned to much more success over time.

Mark Smith: 12:34
You know, back when I started my career in the space, there was a undocumented thing known as Microsoft Make it Right money and that was where Microsoft didn't want to suffer brand reputational risk because a partner had basically skewed a project right. And you know I remember being pulled on one project. It was sold and you think this was 15 years ago. It was sold for $800,000. I was called in when it got to $1.8 million as to what has gone wrong. And when you looked at it it was fundamental stuff right, no project governance, no project management, no change management. It wasn't. And, of course, what does a customer do. Oh, the tech is broken, right?

Mark Smith: 13:20
I remember being pulled into in canberra in australia by microsoft to talk to what the I think it was the second largest agency big dynamics, implementation of them going the product's broken. Took me a quick look to see that the product wasn't broken. People had engineered over engineered, done stuff that was back then outside the sdk in breach of it because they didn't even know that sdk existed, type thing. And yet they get called on these big projects. And so have you seen a turn of the tide to the projects that have been under the covering being much more successful as a standard, like success by design, rather than the failures that we've seen in software projects in the past 100%.

Alok Singh: 14:05
I think what our data is showing is that when we look at projects where FastTrack is engaged, we have early engagement, and I think the word early is really key there. Right, yeah, if we get engaged maybe a month before the go live, you know, success by design is not going to make that difference, right, yes, early on. And when I say early on, it's essentially when you have understood the business problem that you're trying to solve and you've gone into you know, just coming out of the discovery phase, that this is how I'm going to go about this. Right, that's the perfect time to start using the Success by Design framework.

Alok Singh: 14:41
Some of the reviews that we have, like the solution blueprint review and engaging with the fast track architect if you have one on your project right solution blueprint review and engaging with the fast track architect if you have one on your project right and doing that has shown that the adoption is higher. I think when we looked at the numbers last and this was a few years back it was 2.2x higher adoption we have seen on those projects. Anecdotally, if you just look at the kind of challenges, escalations, of firefighting that we have to do, it's significantly lower on these projects. And the best part is what we have seen here is that these projects are the ones who are more likely to benefit from the future capabilities and the features that are coming, because the way this has been built, you're more aligned to our product direction, right? So I think that's been, I would say, the key to our success and the whole demand that we have seen for this program and, mark, I think that you described why Success by Design was created Exactly what you were describing.

Pedro Sacramento : 15:34
I think that Alec was also laughing because you were describing the issues that we encounter right, sometimes just moving to the cloud and copying or mimicking what was in on-premise and trying to replicate it to online, like all of those scenarios. That's what we started documenting, right, and especially how to avoid them and how to identify them in an early stage. That's why Alok is saying that it's important for us to start engaging in an early stage and not just before the go-live.

Mark Smith: 16:00
Yeah, at what point did you go? You know what, if we're going to get the scale, we need to bring partners and we need to kind of make sure they've been trained in the way you know as what good looks like, get them to understand it, get them to use the same nomenclature, talk about it the same way and really implement those success principles. How did that come about For me? I was in Atlanta when James Phillips on stage announced the first raft of outside Microsoft FastTrack recognized solution architects and that was very prestigious recognition. When was that? What was the thinking around deciding? Was it just purely scale?

Alok Singh: 16:43
I think it's a great question because if we look at the whole kind of the FastTrack model and when we started working with one customer at a time and when we're very early stages of this program, right, we face a couple of challenges and I'll be candid here that with some of the partners they felt that microsoft is coming and auditing the work that they're doing 100, like I was there.

Mark Smith: 17:05
I was that type of partner going what the freak? I don't need you, I'm smarter than you, yeah.

Alok Singh: 17:11
It felt like, you know, are we going to do things that are going to make the partner look bad in front of the customer? Right? So that was one challenge. The other thing was, when we signed this SAW, we never accounted for the time that we're going to spend with FastTrack. You're going to ask us to go this solution blueprint review, you're asking us to do the go-live readiness these things are not accounted for. So who's actually going to pay for this time, right? Yes, yes.

Alok Singh: 17:35
So in super early stages of FastTrack, we started seeing these challenges and I think it took us some time to actually create that clarity with the partner community that you know this is not actually becoming an auditing. We are saying that let's collaborate really, really early. We set the direction right and the product is evolving very quickly. There's a lot changing and I think we have been there around when we moved to the one version I don't know if you remember that one version move, unified interface move as well. So there were a lot of shifts that were happening right, and also partners and customers. They were both struggling with this constant change. That's coming right. Where do I go for direction? Where do I go get help around this? And that's where I think the value of the fast track became more and more clear. Now they're not here to audit. They are helping us better align to where Microsoft is going, and this is a very fast moving space, right.

Alok Singh: 18:31
That realization actually then made it super clear that actually this is Microsoft's investment into success rather than auditing. And it did feel like audit when things went wrong and we came in really late, right, you're like, but why didn't you do it this way At that point? It does feel like audit and honestly, it makes everyone look bad the partner Microsoft and in really late, right, you're like, but why didn't you do it this way At that point? It does feel like audit and, honestly, it makes everyone look bad the partner Microsoft and in many cases, you know the approach that customer has pushed for as well. Right, so early alignment is the key here.

Alok Singh: 18:59
But to your point, to specifically answer your question we had to get through that barrier of FastTrack is not an auditor, but actually your collaborator, right? And once we came to that and we invested in, some of our better tooling and frameworks were made publicly available for our partners to consume. I think that's when we felt that we are ready for our partners to go and do this on their own and we can support them in the background. So the level of direct engagement from Microsoft wasn't that necessary. But I think understanding what Success by Design, what FastTrack is, and our investment in tooling made significant difference.

Pedro Sacramento : 19:37
And that second one investment. I mean, we had to wait for the moment to come, because we started, like Alec was explaining before, we started this with a simple spreadsheet. That's how it was born, right? It was a spreadsheet, everyone chiming in and providing their understanding and their learnings in an Excel spreadsheet. We've moved that to a proper tool where everyone collaborates as well to enrich the knowledge base. Now it's a portal that is available to partners and partners can leverage.

Pedro Sacramento : 20:04
So we had to grow in terms of how we documented, how we collected all of our learnings and make them available. At the same time, we were growing and showcasing the work that we were doing, just also to highlight that we are not competing with anyone. Right, we were here to help, so both of them were happening at the same time, and then the perfect moment happened, right. Also, the launch of the guides. I think that made everything possible. Right, because we're also saying look, we've documented everything and it's here or I mean not everything, but a big amount of information and it's also here for you to leverage. Right? All of that became available and with that, we are also showing that we are here to help everyone.

Alok Singh: 20:44
Yeah, yeah, the guides was a really good point and it was actually James Phillips who nudged us. I think he was meeting one of the customers in Australia. They told well, fasttrack is great, but you know what we don't want to always depend on? You know, having FastTrack on every single rollout or every single phase, why don't you provide us that guidance so we all can, you know, consume it whenever we want and make it more self-serve? It started off like an implementation guide book and I think the idea was it came from James Phillips, me, pedro, I think, the rest of the team it was around eight or 10 of us who were involved in putting that book together 800 odd pages yeah, 700 or 800 pages PDF yeah.

Alok Singh: 21:25
Yeah, I think a lot of focus was on driving the right mindset than going deep on the product. But I think a lot of aspects of that book are actually updated. It's in the docs now, so it's available to everyone.


Mark Smith: 21:38
Is it still a virtual document now that can be updated? I haven't looked at it for a while.

Alok Singh: 21:43
I think it's moved to learn now Okay, yeah.

Pedro Sacramento : 21:46
It's just like any documentation that we have. It's breaking down by topics, and then you can navigate easily.

Mark Smith: 21:53
How did you internally, so not the partner side, but internally in Microsoft? Where's the differentiator between you and the PowerCat team and how you engage on customers? Do you have a rules of engagement, Because I know that they stick to their important customers? From an architectural type review We've seen in recent times, is it well architected?

Alok Singh: 22:17
Yeah.

Mark Smith: 22:17
You know, also come out about two years ago, I think it was in the BizApp space. How is that all? How do you handle who does what and that you're not duplicating effort and things like that?

Alok Singh: 22:29
that's a great question.

Alok Singh: 22:30
I think our focus areas even though, if you look at it from org perspective, we are still, you know, part of the same organization but our focus has been more on the first party dynamics, piece five apps and that's always been the fast track thing, while they focus on you know platform in general, including you knowID dev, et cetera.

Alok Singh: 22:50
So we would engage wherever there's a first-party app and they continue to focus on the platform In terms of sharing our learnings, success by Design, something that they have also contributed on it. From a power platform perspective, some of the platform elements, the tooling that we use internally to kind of share these learnings or even to log things that engineering needs to hear we all are joined up on top of the V teams that we have internally. So we do have strong collaboration, but I think our engagement models and the customer coverage is really different. So they were focused on the kind of the top end of the customers who are specifically trying to roll out the platform right and get that SID dev going versus we were always on the first party. The good thing is that when it comes to implementation portal and how the tooling is evolving in the near future on board the Parkat team as well and they'll start bringing their resources. So from a partner perspective, it's going to be one place for them to collaborate and track all the engagements Perfect.

Mark Smith: 23:54
If we look at the FastTrack Recognize Solution Architect and I've told this to many people in my mind it's more valuable than being an MVP and the recognition of that and a couple of reasons One like the MVP program, it's assessed each year, so you can't do something 15 years ago and still be recognized for it today, which I think is critically important in the speed of change, with two wave releases a year in the space is there's all. Everything's changed right, there's nothing permanent. So I think the revalidation is great. The other thing is you've got to be on a project to get this recognition. You can't be book smart, you can't be theoretical about it. It is tied to actual work and and therefore my mind, I feel it's the most prestigious recognition of the architectural role. That requires you to have not been an architect for just for five minutes. Right, you've got to have some history behind you and what you do.

Mark Smith: 24:54
How do you make sure you don't dilute that going forward? You know that you don't dilute the value, the recognition of that, so that one customers, when they see somebody with a fast track, recognized designation, that they know this is the cream of the crop, right? These are people that have tenure. They have been doing this for a while. I'm not dealing with the grad that came out of university last year, set the PL 600 exam and got you know is like ah, I'm a certified architect and you're like, yeah, in theory you are. You've never been in a project that started to go wrong, you've never had to recover, you've never made the mistakes, which is a total different thing, and I think that this program takes that into account and therefore it is the cream of the crop. How do you make sure it doesn't get diluted in time?

Alok Singh: 25:48
Maybe what I'll do is I'll just talk a little bit about the process and a little bit about our thinking behind it and how we go about maybe recognizing folks, because I think we just met earlier today on that as well. So when we came up with the Fast Work Recognized Solution Architect, I think our idea was again going back to that thinking of scale right, we can't be there on every project all the time. We might do maybe one phase, but you know we just won't be able to scale to cover everything all the time. So what we started doing was, on specific projects, when we see a partner architect who is working with us and they're bringing the right, I would say, success by design mindset. I think that's almost foundational to it. What I mean by that mindset essentially is they are not the tech implementation team right when I want you to go build me that really blue, green, yellow button and they go and figure out how shall I do that? They're actually involved in understanding the business problem and are part of the solution team right Now. They bring the technical expertise, but they know the problem that they're trying to solve. I think that's the first thing that we'll look at. The next thing is the work that the architect is doing, and in many cases it also involves challenging the requirements right, challenging the customer to effectively help them align to how this problem can be solved with this product or with the platform, because I think Pedro mentioned this earlier and we used to see a lot of this before that you are now trying to potentially replicate your old system on a new platform, with some tweaks here and there, but not holistically. Looking at this platform as a way to go solve a business problem, right? So, bringing that mindset and challenging the customers to make sure that they are maximizing the value that they can get from the product, that's the other thing that we look at.

Alok Singh: 27:44
Other thing that we look at. To me, the first go live when the project actually goes live and many a times you know that's like okay, that's a successful go live that's really the start. The true success is are you actually able to deliver something that you can iterate on really quickly, right? That's key. So, which means you know you're doing all the foundation elements of ALM right. Are you actually able to go and make releases into production every two weeks? Do you have that set up?

Alok Singh: 28:13
So, are you really setting up the customer for long-term success and to be able to iterate, adopt new capabilities, because that value realization is going to rely on an ability to iterate and that's another factor that we look at. So setting up the customer for long-term success, I would say so those three things kind of drive the success by design mindset. So that's primary. And with the partner architects, where we see that, I think we want to recognize them that even if we are not there on this project, they can go drive this success right. I think that was really the fundamental idea behind the FDRSA.

Pedro Sacramento : 28:50
Nice, all right, and, if I can add, so I think what Alec was saying is that we look at different things. When we look at fast track, recognized architects, so basically it's how they engage in projects and especially if or when they go live, and if they go live successfully, the adoption of those projects, what innovation that is being implemented. We look at all of those right, so we kind of have a sense, working with them day by day, how that project is going. So we can do that analysis and most of the times we work with someone that not only in one project, in several projects, right, because they move, like the architects, especially the architects, they move from different projects at the same time. So that's one of the areas where we work closer with them. We can recognize their work right.

Pedro Sacramento : 29:37
In terms of MVPs and I was briefly on the community growth team a while back, so I was doing the MVP renewal process, validation, let's call it like that where we need to look at what are the contributions for that year, right, and I think that we look at how the MVPs are contributing to the community and that can be by different ways, like events. Speaking at events can be by creating posts in blogs, answering forum questions. So it's all of those contributions. It's also valuable. I'm not saying that one is more valuable than the other one, it's not. It's just a different way of contributing to the community, so that's how we distinguish them.

Pedro Sacramento : 30:16
I'm not. It's just a different way of contributing to the community, so that's how we distinguish them, right? I'm not sure if there are plans to merge them eventually. I don't know, and I know that it's a sensitive topic. I'm not even sure if that makes sense. I'm not saying it does. I'm just saying that there are two different types of recognitions that we give to people. One is how they contribute to the community and the other one is how they contribute to projects and to implementations.

Mark Smith: 30:37
And to go-lives. Yes, as I said, pre-call, I'd be strongly opposed to them merging together because I think that the technical prowess that comes with FastTrack Recognize Architect is an important differentiator. The other piece of advice not piece of advice, but something to consider that the little rub that I've had with the program, probably that's been identified in the last three years. About a year ago I left IBM. I was working for IBM in Australia and we would work with enterprise customers and the trend that I noticed in the market is that the big customers are relying less on partners. Customers are relying less on partners and the reason is the global stage has changed. Right Is that now?

Mark Smith: 31:26
If I'm a big, you know, 20 years ago IT was in a lot of organizations a separate area and we don't have the expertise. So we're bringing partners. A maturity has happened globally. Most people, if you're in a corporate environment, have a level of IT skills that the same person in your role wouldn't have had 20 years ago. It's just a given right. No one goes oh, I need to go for Excel training. Everyone uses it from university on, and so what?

Mark Smith: 31:47
I've noticed in these big partners that they are like hey, why don't we just go out and set up our own internal practice. To run our projects We'll go hire the MVPs, the Fast Track Recognized Architects, from a partner or whatever. But of course the minute that Fast Track Recognized individual leaves partner land, the program no longer applies. And so I have seen in large customers in Australia, architects that have been formerly in partner land. They go and become a dedicated architect.

Mark Smith: 32:18
They're across the one project I'm thinking of 44,000 seats, licensed seats inside the organization, so not small but they can't get recognized as a fast track recognized architect even though they're applying success by design, but there's that little rub that they're not in partner land. They're applying success by design, but there's that little rub that they're not in partner land. And I think that in recognition of the changing landscape, like to those individuals, this would be recognition back into the companies that they're working for now, but also part of their career progression, which is not available because they don't work in partner land. And I found it interesting when we talked just earlier that you talked about 120 partners. You've just reached that target. So is it? Do you see it more as a individual contribution within a partner or is it really for you? Your framework requires a partner to own the designation of their fast track recognized architects internally.

Alok Singh: 33:14
Yeah, I think it's a very interesting point that you mentioned. I think we can maybe talk about this whole trend of you know in-house teams and you know what's the perspective on that. But when we fundamentally started with the FastTrack Recognize solution architect, this came from our partner success team. So the team that was aligned to partner success, it's they who essentially started off this program and they partnered with FastTrack to say that. You know, we want to get the signal from you on who are these recognized within the, who are the architects within the partner community that we should recognize for their good work, right? So the program is fundamentally aligned to our partner success program. I get the same question because we run a lot of partner bootcamps and stuff and I work with customer architects as well and they would come and say that you know why can't I attend that bootcamp, right?

Alok Singh: 34:05
Yes yes, I appreciate it. I think there's something that we need to think about how do we do that, you know, for the architects involved? That's a good feedback. I don't think I have a great answer right now.

Mark Smith: 34:16
No, as in I do, as in the minute I finished answering the question, it came to me it's funding lines, right, the fact that it's funded via the partner program makes it very clear why it is a partner thing. Like, as I say, the minute I finished asking I realized, yes, it's a funding line reason and that's why it is. It's a funding line reason and that's why it is. One little other stat I'll throw in the co-founder of LinkedIn, reid Hoffman, has recently said that by 2035, 50% of the US workforce will be contractors, so they won't be working, and I feel that's going to apply to IT folks more than ever. Another trend that I've noticed in the last three to five years, since the pandemic, really is this massive move of very senior skilled staff moving out of partner land and becoming independent contractors, and so they're going from project to project and being very successful and building a reputation, hence why they generally have a backlog of opportunities to go to, and I just wonder that, once again, you know, an evolution may be in store. Any final words?

Alok Singh: 35:26
I think, first of all, this has been a great conversation and I'd love to maybe keep talking about a lot of these topics, but I think it's really our key focus now and you know, maybe I want to highlight this is that everything that we do from a success by design perspective you know, working with our customers, enabling our partners to do this we want to democratize this guidance, this content, so it's available out there.

Alok Singh: 35:52
Even if you're not a partner, if you're just, you're just an individual contractor or a consultant working on a customer project, you can go and use the self-serve capabilities of the portal. Yes, which means, at least from our perspective, there's nothing that's holding back anyone from benefiting from Success by Design, from the content that we have and the overall framework. So we want to be inclusive. Whether you're working with a customer partner or an individual contractor, we don't take away access to the tooling and the content. So that's there for you and the more you can adopt this on your projects. We have driven some great success and there's no reason why you cannot use this and drive success on your projects.

Pedro Sacramento : 36:33
I can give a couple of examples.

Pedro Sacramento : 36:40
I'm not on the FastTrack team anymore, so Al has more information about the latest and greatest about success by design and how FastTrack is working now, but I can tell that while we were writing the implementation guide, most of the information that was there I mean I would love to get it on my hands before I even work with Dynamics, because it's also applicable.

Pedro Sacramento : 36:55
It's not something specific to Dynamics, so there's a lot of knowledge there that can be applicable to other products, other technologies as well. And the second thing is I've moved out of the FastTrack team but even today I still leverage success by design principles. So my current team I've implemented a checklist, for example. That's something that comes with success by design and even with the implementation guides at the end of each chapter we create a checklist right, so I use that often. I go back to that where something is not clear, where I think that we need to have some guidance on what is the goal, what is the outcome. I use it often. So there are a lot of advantages of leveraging not only dynamics with Power Platform, but also with other products as well.

Mark Smith: 37:39
Yeah, I like the checklist idea. There's a book called the Checklist Manifesto and a lot of research was done in medical institutions and constructing large buildings and architecture and stuff and they found that consistent success were those that implemented checklists. So it's that mindset right. It's those fundamentals.

Alok Singh: 37:58
It was James Phillips who insisted that we have a checklist at the end of every chapter.

Mark Smith: 38:02
Yeah, interesting, interesting, great guy, great guy. Thank you so much for coming on. I've really enjoyed this. I found it an enlightening discussion. I really hope a lot of people get value and look up. We'll put in the show notes resources to the portal that were discussed for the various assets. So go learn, find out more and consider implementing a mindset of success in your projects. Great Chad, thanks, mark. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. Is there a guest you would like to see on the show from Microsoft? Please message me on LinkedIn and I'll see what I can do. Final question for you how will you create with Copilot today, ka kite.