Get Scrum Certified for Free: How Microsoft Partners Can Use Co-Op Funds

[00:00:00] Neil Benson: Today I wanted to let you in on a little secret. If you are a Dynamics 365 or Power Platform practice leader, you can get your team Scrum trained and certified and have Microsoft pay for it.

That's right. There's no tricks. There's no gimmicks. There's no loopholes here. It's just a good old fashioned Microsoft partner benefit that most partners are either underusing or ignoring altogether. Good day and welcome to Amazing Apps. I'm your host, Neil Benson, Microsoft MVP, agile evangelist, and professional coffee drinker at Superware where I lead a team of amazing app builders.

I'm on a mission to help you master agile practices and build amazing apps on the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365.

Amazing Apps is the result of my own curiosity and experiments with new ways of building amazing apps and high performing application development teams. It's full of advice from my guests and examples from some of my work over the last few years leading business applications teams and practices.

If you enjoy this episode, head on over to AmazingApps.Show for additional resources.

And today I wanted to let you in on a little secret. If you are a Dynamics 365 or Power Platform practice leader, you can get your team Scrum trained and certified and have Microsoft pay for it.

That's right. There's no tricks. There's no gimmicks. There's no loopholes here. It's just a good old fashioned Microsoft partner benefit that most partners are either underusing or ignoring altogether.

So grab a coffee, unless you're driving, of course, and that's unpack how to skill up your team in agile delivery without dipping into your training budget.

And let's start with a simple truth. Agile delivery is no longer a nice to have in business applications projects. It's an expectation today. Your customers want that kind of flexibility. They want transparency. They want to be able to pivot halfway through the project and still get it delivered on time. Bless them.

That's where Scrum comes in. It's the most widely used Agile framework, and it's a great fit for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform projects, when used properly.

The problem is most Microsoft partners dabble.

Maybe someone made a blog, maybe the project manager took a course. Maybe there's a Kanban board somewhere with tasks that haven't moved in a few months. Does any of that sound familiar? And it's not a dig. We've all been there. I've been there.

But if you want repeatable, profitable, low drama delivery, then you've gotta get your team trained the right way.

A few years ago after teaching Scrum to dozens of my consultants, well across Increase, um, Outsourcery, Slalom, KPMG and watching partners struggle with generic agile training, I thought, wouldn't it be great if there was a course built specifically for people delivering Microsoft Business Applications?

Not a course full of stories about software startups in hoodies, no kind of theory from trainers who've never seen a Microsoft Business Apps deployment in the wild.

In fact, a few years ago I went to Mike Cohn's Certified Scrum Master training. Legend in the Scrum , you know, training realm. He hadn't been a developer for 20 years by that point, and he'd never heard of Dynamics 365. In fact, no one in the room is about 60 people, none of them had heard of Dynamics 365.

I wanted my consultants in my teams to learn actual proven practices, tools, and examples from real world Dynamics and Power Platform projects. So I created Successful Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps.

It's a self-paced course packed with lessons from the trenches. It'll take your team members about 16 hours to go through from beginning to end. It includes a practice exam that mimics the Scrum dot org Professional Scrum exam format. In fact, it uses the exact same, um, exam engine. It includes the $200 Scrum.org Professional Scrum exam voucher. Yep, that's included in the price as well, and wait for it, my Exam Pass Guarantee.

If your team member passes my practice exam and doesn't pass the certification exam, I'll send them another $200 exam voucher at my expense. Hundreds of my students have achieved their Scrum certification and only two have ever claimed a second attempt through the Exam Pass Guarantee. So the pass rate is nearly 99%. That's pretty good, hey?

But the best part, you don't have to pay for any of it.

This is where the Microsoft Co-op incentive program comes in. So let's talk for a moment about co-op funds. If you're a Microsoft partner with a solution designation, the chances are you're earning co-op funds through the Microsoft Incentives program.

Those are the mysterious line item your finance team sees and goes, should we be using these for something? Yes. Yes, you should.

Uh, these funds can be used for Partner Readiness, and that includes eligible internal training. And Successful Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps is exactly that. So instead of debating whether you can afford to train your team this quarter or this year, just have Microsoft pick up the bill.

It's like those loyalty points you forget to spend except the Microsoft ones expire and could make your consultants way more billable. There's no catch, but there are a few things you need to know.

Firstly, you need to be enrolled in the Incentive program. If you're not sure, ask your uh, internal Microsoft alliance manager or check in Microsoft Partner Center.

Secondly, you need to submit a claim after your team registers. We'll give you a clear invoice, proof of execution, and all that good stuff you need to support your claim. And number three, there are deadlines. Co-op funds typically follow a six month cycle, so you have to use them before they vanish into the fiscal ether. Uh, the new fiscal year has just started, so now is a great time to look into using up your funds.

If you're worried about the claims process, don't be, I've written a handy blog post to walk you through it, and there's a link to that in the episode description. Or just shoot me a message and I'll help you out.

But Neil, does it actually work? Yes, it, it does work. And it's not just for individuals. Over 200 consultants have passed their Scrum certification through this course. Partners like ANS Group, ITK Consulting, Telefonica Tech. They're not just using Scrum, they're using it consistently across teams with shared language and predictable outcomes.

They're not burning out their best people. They're not losing margin on rework. They're not writing 15 page change requests for every little scope tweak, and they're delivering and they're making it look pretty easy.

Lemme give you a flavor of some of the projects. I've used my own practices on a $4 million implementation of Dynamics 365 for a US real estate firm that had 50,000 residential tenants.

A membership platform and contact center applications here in Australia for our roadside assistance and insurance provider. That was a three year program with over a hundred people, um, in the program, uh, working in it at its peak.

And a customer service transformation at a global sales and marketing agency across 30 countries. And in every case we used Scrum, not textbook Scrum, but maybe Business Apps Scrum. And that's the kind of insights your teams get when they take the course.

If you're leading a Microsoft Business Apps practice, you want your delivery teams to deliver on time and on budget. To reduce project stress for consultants and for you, and for your customers, and any kind of burn out. You wanna build more referenceable, happier customers, then you need to get Scrum certified with confidence, and you can do that with my Successful Scrum from Microsoft Business Apps course. It's made for you and your consultants.

It's the only Scrum training and certification program that is built specifically for Microsoft professionals. So it's the only Scrum course in the world, I think, that's eligible for co-op fund reimbursement. So if you want to do all of that without spending your training budget, this is your moment. This is what you have to do.

1. Visit Customery.com/courses/scrum to see the full details of the course. There'll be a link to that in the show notes.

Secondly, enroll your team. The checkout gives you the option to register as many people as you like. There's a 20% discount when you register five or more people at once.

You'll receive an order confirmation and your team members will receive their login details immediately. I'll also send them a personalized video and an invitation to book a welcome call with me.

3. Submit your co-op claim in Partner Center to get the full reimbursement.

4. Congratulate yourself on being a savvy, modern practice leader who just got Microsoft to sponsor their agile transformation.

If you have any questions about how to do any of that, I'll leave a link in the episode description to the blog article that provides more detailed instructions and my contact information. If you need help at any point along the way.

When Exigo Tech's Cloud Practice Manager, Kanthan, contacted me on the 13th of June regarding his incentive co-op funds expiring two weeks later, I created a training package to include our Successful Scrum course and Winning Agile Projects masterclass for his Dynamics 365 delivery and business development teams.

Exigo Tech, by the way, is a technology consultancy with about 150 people across Australia and Asia delivering Microsoft Business Apps, cloud, data and analytics, AI and security services.

The training courses were completed shortly afterwards, and Exigo Tech's training investment was all reimbursed in full through their Microsoft Incentive co-op funds

Today, Exigo Tech's Scrum certified delivery team are receiving Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards as well as Women in ICT awards for a couple of the folks that I trained in Scrum for their excellence in project delivery.

So this stuff works and you can get it reimbursed by Microsoft. How good is that?

Well, what does Microsoft think about partners using their incentive funds for Scrum training?

I reached out to Philip Barlow. He's a director in, uh, the Global Partner Solutions business unit at Microsoft, and he had this to say, "The courses offered by Customery that focus on Microsoft solutions is a key commitment Microsoft is making to its partners. We need our partners to build the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications that Microsoft customers need now more than ever to drive efficiencies in their business, reach new customers, and react to changing market pressures quickly."

And what do consultants think of the course? Well, Jin Chung, a Power Platform consultant, MPowerUp in the UK, emailed me recently after taking the course to say this, "Hey neil, just wanted to share the joy of passing the exam. I scored 100%, which I really wasn't expecting. Grinning face emoji. This certification has been something I've wanted to pursue for a long time, but I was never quite sure how to approach it. Thank you for creating such a fantastic course. Your insights and experience in the Power Platform space truly brought Scrum to life for us."

So your consultants will appreciate the investment you're making in their skills and the fact that you're making their lives better, and Microsoft think it's such a good idea, they'll reimburse your investment. Win, win, win.

Thanks for tuning in. If you find this episode helpful, share it with your Microsoft alliance manager or your delivery leadership team and help them look like rock stars too.

If you've got any questions about using Microsoft Incentive co-op funds for Scrum training and certification for your team, I'll leave my contact information in the episode description and you can email me or book a short call.

Until next time, keep building amazing apps and keep experimenting. I'll see you soon.