Agile Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations with Paul Heisterkamp

Neil Benson: [00:00:00]  Welcome to the Amazing Applications podcast for Microsoft business applications creators who want to build Amazing Applications that everyone will love.

 Hi, I'm your host Neil Benson. Our goal on this show is to help you slash your project budgets, reduce your delivery timelines, mitigate technical risks, and create amazing agile Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications. 

Welcome back to the Amazing Applications podcast, or, you know, just welcome if this is your first time. I'm glad you're here.

You'll find show notes for this episode at customery.com/033, where you'll find links to my guest in this episode, as well as resources so you can dive deeper into the topics we cover. 

In this episode, I catch up with Paul Heisterkamp. Paul is a Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations solution architect and developer at GWS in Germany.

He's received his first Microsoft MVP award last year and was recently awarded his second FastTrack recognized solution architect award. It seems like after 12 years of working with Dynamics ERP is finally become an overnight success. Congratulations, Paul. 

Paul shares with us his story of a multi-country Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations project for an international automotive parts supplier. They've got 1200 users in the first wave of their deployment and 500 in the second to replace in the second wave to replace a legacy in-house ERP application with Dynamics 365 F&O. We discuss phasing long-term international enterprise projects, how they have adopted an agile approach to ERP, dealing with the challenges of remote working, how they bet on the first version of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations running in the cloud a couple of years ago, as well as upgrading every six months. We also cover application life cycle management with Lifecycle Services and Azure DevOps and working with the Microsoft FastTrack team successfully. 

It's great to hear another Dynamics 365 ERP professional share their story. If you'd like to share yours, we'd love to have you on the show. Visit customery.com/guest to find out more about joining me on the Amazing Applications podcast. I can't accept everyone onto the show, but if you don't try, you'll never know. 

Just before we catch up with Paul, I'd like to give a quick shout out to some of my friends at Redspire, a Microsoft partner in Glasgow, in Scotland. Congratulations to Lloyd Grose, Brett Davis, Ross McGhee, Kevin Ansell and several more there. They're just a few of the Redspire consultants who completed my Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps course. It's great to see the Redspire team learning Scrum, achieving their Professional Scrum Master certification and applying an agile approach to their customers' Dynamics 365 and Power Platform projects. 

Okay. Here's my chat with Paul Heisterkamp.

 Paul, welcome to the Amazing Applications podcast. It's great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:03:44] Thanks for having me Neil. It's a nice pleasure for me to be here.  

Neil Benson: [00:03:48] Paul you have you've achieved an MVP award. You've recently been recognized with the FastTrack Recognized  Solution Architect award. And we're going to get into those in a moment. I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself, but first of all, can you tell us what you had for breakfast this morning?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:04:03] I had some cereals. So to go up to the home office is not that good. If you have too big breakfast. So some cereals.

Neil Benson: [00:04:14] Okay. So you're working from home at the moment.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:04:16] Yeah.

Neil Benson: [00:04:18] Okay. And what was your first job and how did you get that one?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:04:22] I started after school with an education of three years. So there's a vacation program in Germany that lasts three years and there I learned to program in C# and yeah that started right after school.

Neil Benson: [00:04:40] So you were a programmer from a very early age.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:04:43] Yeah. Yeah. So C#  is not that native, but yeah.

Neil Benson: [00:04:48] Tell us about your current role.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:04:50] Yeah. My current role is I'm a solution architect at the GWS in Germany. And I'm designing and driving projects with Dynamics Finance and Operations. That role I started in 2011.  

Neil Benson: [00:05:10] How have you found it working from home over the last period? 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:05:12] Yeah. One and a half year. I think it is now. I feel quite comfortable with it, but this is more because my wife is currently on parental leave so she can handle the kids and I can work from home.

Neil Benson: [00:05:31] I'm about the same. I've been working from home for a year. I really miss working with people in the office. In fact, my old project team, we are allowed to meet for drinks under certain restrictions here in Brisbane. So we met up for drinks last week and it was wonderful to see everybody again. I think a lot of people in our profession are still working from home adjusting to it slowly.

 Paul Heisterkamp: [00:05:52] In our case, there is no end at the tunnel visible.

Neil Benson: [00:05:57] Oh, sorry to hear that. Yeah.  We're very lucky here in Brisbane that we've had very few cases, but we've also got no vaccinations either. So see what happens over the next year or so. 

Thank you very much for joining me on this show. What I wanted to do was to find out more about one of the successful projects you've worked on building an amazing application.

We don't have enough Finance and Operations people on the show. So really interested to find out more about your customer and about the project and about the application you built. So can you give us a quick introduction to the customer we're going to talk about today?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:06:29] Yeah, we're talking about an customer that works in the independent aftermarket. So these ones are selling spare parts for cars to workshops. This customer's located in Austria and Switzerland.

Can you give us an idea of what kind of size they are in terms of number of staff perhaps?

Yeah. Currently, live, there are roundabout 1,200 users, and we are implemented them in two waves, but there's currently another wave happening where they're adding again, I think four or 500 users to the application.

Neil Benson: [00:07:09] Oh, okay. So it's a big deployment, big project.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:07:11] Yeah, it's quite big. I think with F &O we are always in this size of implementations. Of course, there are smaller ones, but GWS is most likely driving bigger implementation projects.

Neil Benson: [00:07:26] What kind of challenges was this particular customer-facing that led them to adopt Finance and Operations?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:07:33] I think they had an quite old implementation. It was working fine, of course, because it was a self-crafted self-build it over years. But then they decided to jump on the digitalization train. And this is because they decided to go with, F&O. 

Neil Benson: [00:07:57] So they had built their own ERP system or were they using Dynamics AX and this is an upgrade?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:08:03] No, they were using completely self-developed ERP system. But that one they wanted to replace with AX or F&O.

Neil Benson: [00:08:14] There's not many people developing their own ERP systems these days.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:08:19] These days, not a thing, but I think in the old days there were some companies that were doing this one, but then they all over at the time realized that they cannot keep track with the digitalization process and the speed Microsoft is able to drive.

Neil Benson: [00:08:40] I just helped a customer replace a legacy application, a back-office application that was about 30 years old. It was a commercial application, but it had been customized very extensively and had no support from the vendor for the last few years.  It's good to see some of those systems being retired so that they can modernize their business processes and give their users new capabilities.

 Tell me about the type of team your customer had in place and how big is the GWS team working in this project as well?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:09:09] So the GWS has roundabout, I think 400 employees. And we worked on this project, I think at the beginning with a team of 20 or 30 people. And during go live this increased because it was not during COVID, so there was onsite support and so on. But now, because it is live for some years already we decreased the project team there to to reschedule them.

Neil Benson: [00:09:48] Okay. That's actually quite a big project team. And on the customer side, was there also the same number of people involved on their side as well?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:09:58] Yeah. I think at the end even bigger because the whole company has to adopt those new systems and new process, but they had for each module, the key users and some pardon. Project leads. And they are driving or they were driving the parts of the project.

Neil Benson: [00:10:20] Could you want to tell me about the approach that you have taken to the project? You mentioned before we started recording that you started out using scrum, how has that gone?

 Paul Heisterkamp: [00:10:30] That project in the end of 2016, so this was the first wave. We normally have in such big projects one and a half years implementation phase till go live. And in this phase, we did the analysis phase and the design phase, and then we have kind of a backlog to split on different development iterations.

We call them similar to scrum sprints and we are working with sprint length of two or four weeks. But these sprints are only to schedule the work into pieces and not to develop the whole application, like a waterfall model. So after each sprint, we are able to show some new functionalities.

Neil Benson: [00:11:26] It sounds like you've adopted some of the parts of scrum, some agile ways of working and made it your own.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:11:33] Yeah, we also doing dailies. Every day of 15 minutes, stand up meeting, of course, stand up with Teams is a bit problematic, but yeah, it is a touchpoint for the development team and the functional team to synchronize the state of some testing or development efforts.

Neil Benson: [00:11:56] What parts of scrum do you think were hardest to adopt, particularly thinking about ERP projects? I get asked quite a lot about how to adopt an agile approach by ERP practitioners. Why do you think it's such a challenge?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:12:10] It's a challenge because in your ERP projects you always have a hard timelines, so you will have some milestones where the customer is not willing to have some new feature, but this one is fixed. And so you have to schedule the work on. So the hardest part and the part we are not using is the sprint planning.

So this sprint planning is that everyone is able to do everything. So you just pick up task from a queue. And this one is not that plannable. So we are scheduling the task in the background on feature level. So we are assigning work to develop us, to get a timeline and the road to plan with a fixed delivery dates.

Neil Benson: [00:13:04] Okay. Because your skills are quite specialized and you've got some hard deadlines, then you find that it's better to schedule some of the work to the developers rather than the scrum approach where the developers choose work from the backlog. And you find that's working for you. 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:13:21] That is also better from the resource planning perspective because you have dedicated resources. You see that this developer has enough work till May, and then you can plan for additional work and with this sprint planning, it is not that plannable for the future, I think.

Neil Benson: [00:13:43] So maybe adopting your approach there to doing some more planning around each wave and the resources that are going to be required.  I'm really impressed to hear people taking an agile approach to ERP. You've said that the first wave was about 18 months of work, and then there was a release to production at the end of that, which I think is quite typical.

I don't see ERP projects, even taking an agile approach. They're not going into production after, two weeks or two months. There's normally a lot of legacy functionality that needs to be replicated or replaced in your new modern ERP system. And that can take a lot of time and there's a lot of mission-critical testing and data migration that needs to be done as well.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:14:23] That's normally yeah, one to one and a half year, I think from starting development to go live. But then after go-live, of course, we are also doing this agile approach and then there will be releases every month or if you have more pressure every week. Yeah. Whatever the business needs.

Neil Benson: [00:14:46] And since the release of wave one, has the team been growing in size or is it now steady and maybe even tailing off?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:14:54] Steady, I think. So, the second wave was then also one year. And then, so the first wave were roundabout 400 users. And this second wave we were adding 900. And this second wave, there was also an implementation phase of one year. And in this time period, the team was steady. And after the go-live, then we decreased the team.

Neil Benson: [00:15:27] Thinking about how the project was split into waves, was that based on geographical region, on some kind of modular functionality, or some other approach.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:15:38] It was regional driven and also size driven because we do not want to have the bigger part in the first wave. And so we decided to take the smaller part in the first wave to get a pilot to not directly go with a big bang.

Neil Benson: [00:15:59] So reduce the risk of the project. Take a smaller business unit first. If it works really well and proves that the technology is working and then you can tackle them more critical, bigger regional business unit. Good. Thinking about the challenges that you've faced so far, what kind of roadblocks have you run into as a team?

 Paul Heisterkamp: [00:16:17] The the challenges in the first wave was because we started very early with the cloud version of AX or now called Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. So it was very early stage of the product line. And so there were quite some problems related to this early stage let's say, but we had an awesome solution architect from Microsoft assigned, his name is Timo Gossen, and he had an amazing knowledge and connection into the product group and also his commitment to the project was perfect. And so he worked closely with us to eliminate those roadblocks.

 Neil Benson: [00:17:08] Why did your customer choose to go with such an early version?  Lots of customers I heard were not so keen to adopt the very first version of quite a groundbreaking technology from Microsoft. AX was never a native to the cloud. This is almost a new generation of Dynamics AX. A lot of customers were a little bit reluctant to go and adopt it in those early days. Your customer made the decision to try it out.  What led to that decision?  

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:17:36] I think it was because they wanted to replace their legacy ERP and they wanted to use the cloud technology to get all the good things out there. And so they were not willing to wait for one or two or three years to harden the platform. So they decided to start early and the go-live was in March 2018 and that was with version 7.1.

So that is a very early stage. After that they were were 8.1 and then the current version is 10.  

Neil Benson: [00:18:20] What's the process been like working with them through those upgrades every six months to, to update their finance system?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:18:28] I think with such a big customer, it is always a huge effort to test those new releases. There's of course there are tools from Microsoft, like RSAT (Regression Suite Automation Tool) to automate those testing efforts, but with such complex processes, it is not that easy to automate those things. And because of that, every release is a lot of manual testing.

Neil Benson: [00:18:57] Customer engagement customers, they were able to they were able to schedule their upgrades when they were hosted on the Microsoft cloud. 

Today, those updates come in on Microsoft's schedule.  Typically there's two waves a year. It's very similar for finance and operations. But the customers don't get to choose the timing of those. How does that impact an ERP customer in terms of their busy periods during the year or their end of financial year, have you had any issues there?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:19:27] No, because with F&O it is that Microsoft releases, I think eight releases a year and you need to install or you have to install at least two, I think. And if you are in a business season or you're pending validation or something like that. And you're not that far behind you're able to pause those updates and to schedule them as you need for not that busy times, but you have to take up at least every third or every fourth. I don't know exactly because there has been changes. I think in the beginning there was a three or four a year you have to take. Nowadays a bit lower. But if you have those busy times in some businesses, like the Black Friday weeks or something like that, then you can choose to not install updates there.

Neil Benson: [00:20:28] Okay. I didn't know there was still an element of control for Finance and Operations customers to choose their update timing. That's good news.   

I know one of your passions is application life cycle management, and I'm not an expert at all with Lifecycle Services, but I have used Azure DevOps quite a bit in some of my projects and some other ALM tools as well. Can you give us your perspective on what the ALM story looks like for Finance and Operations with LCS, with GitHub, with Azure DevOps? Is LCS is still the place to go or do you think it's going to change? What are the investments that Microsoft's going to make in LCS to make application lifecycle management easier for Finance and Operations customers?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:21:10] It is that you have to use LCS to manage your environments and nothing more.  LCS, I think will move someday to be present in PPAC (Power Platform Admin Center). This is, but this is a future. But AzureDevOps is used in our projects to handle the whole planning and development efforts.

So, we are placing all features there, all user stories. And also the code is there checked into Azure DevOps repositories. And we are also using continuous integration and nightly builds there to always deploy the latest code to dev-test environment and pre-prod environment. And this is at the stage for F&O that you can automate almost everything.

So you do not have to hassle with deployments every night and so on. If you have an proper set up in Azure DevOps, the Azure DevOps pipeline will handle that every night automatically for you. So the developer checks in those changes and Azure DevOps will deploy it via LCS every night to development, test and pre-production systems.

Neil Benson: [00:22:35] I didn't realize it was such mature integration already available between those two tools.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:22:39] Yeah, it's perfect. It's perfect. 

Neil Benson: [00:22:41] I just wonder what's going to happen in the next one to two years. I see Microsoft making so in GitHub which still has a lot of gaps that we enjoy using capability in Azure DevOps that just aren't in GitHub today, Microsoft's working hard to close those gaps. I don't know if both products are going to be around five years from now. It'll be an interesting journey.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:23:03] It may be they're switching over the code components to GitHub and the scheduling and planning things more to Azure DevOps, but let's see.

Neil Benson: [00:23:14] So you mentioned way back, you mentioned that starting with such an early version of the 7.1 of the cloud AX was one of the challenges that your customer faced. Were there any others major hurdles, either within the customer organization or with the technology that you managed to overcome as well?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:23:35] I think it was a good managed project from the change management perspective at the customer side. So there were not that many users that said all the old world was much better. It was more to pick up the new processes and the new UI and so on. And every user after, or most of the users after some time of getting used to it quite enjoyed it.

Neil Benson: [00:24:05] That's nice feedback from your users. other kind of success stories or business benefits as your customer experience, as a result of this project, anything that comes to mind?

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:24:15] Yep. I think yeah, one point is that the new roll out what's happening currently is that they can use the approvals solution to onboard news subsidiaries there. So they have a system that it is working that is future proof and so on, and they can add new organization there. Of course, it is always a project to get an organization that is currently using on-prem system to the cloud, but they do not have to hassle that much with customizations and extension because they have the approvals solution there and they can simply implement it.

Neil Benson: [00:25:00] You mentioned earlier, we were talking about evergreen and having a single version now that all ER P customers are running on a single version in the cloud, except depending on the timing of some updates for some customers, but the major version is the same. So Microsoft's support costs, the ability to update all those customers is accelerated, but you're also using a similar approach for the updates and the customizations that you're applying to all of this customer's subsidiaries. Can you tell us more about that approach? 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:25:29] Yeah, we are also trying to keep this one version approach for the customization so that not every company or every region has their own customizations or their own codebase. They're using the same code base for all companies and instances. But if we, of course, have some differences there, then we of course can work with setup data or so on, but the main customization version is the same and that will reduce support costs there as well.

Neil Benson: [00:26:08] That must be difficult. If I'm the general manager of a business and Austria and I've been doing way or my business has been doing it its own way for 15 or 20 years. I know you want me to adopt this new system from headquarters in Germany and they do it differently to how we do it in Austria. Then you get these struggles  So I imagine that's just as hard as the technology side of keeping one version up to date.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:26:33] Yeah, sure. And of course, with new rollout some smaller customization, but the bigger part is done by the previous roll-outs I would say. And also the knowledge about the cloud technology and the whole ecosystem that has grown with the previous roll-outs.

Neil Benson: [00:26:54] And Paul, you mentioned the involvement of a solution architect from Microsoft. Which is part of Microsoft was that from? Is that from Fasttrack or Microsoft Consulting Services? And what kind of support has Microsoft provided during this project? 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:27:06] So in the early stages of this project, that was Microsoft FastTrack, but there was not this complete Success By Design framework. And we had a closely collaboration cooperation with them. And there were touchpoints as they are currently present in these Success By Design framework, but it was more to also help us to get in touch with the right resources.

If we had problems during the load test, or if we had problems with environment provisioning, then he connected us to the right persons. And yeah, this was the collaboration with Microsoft FastTrack there.

Neil Benson: [00:27:58] Can you tell me a little bit more about the framework? Because I think it's something that Microsoft partners can now get trained in. Is that right? 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:28:04] So it is a framework for finding risks and problems in the project very early. And there are two kinds of projects I would say. The one that is lead it by Microsoft FastTrack and the one that are lead by the implementation partner. And this depends on the size and Microsoft leads the project, then they adapt or they bring in this Success By Design framework. But also you, as an implementation partner can use the framework and all the artefacts to also drive a project with Success By Design framework.

Neil Benson: [00:28:54] That sounds great. I'll have to find some resources, include those in the show notes to help the audience navigate that one. 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:29:00] It's really good. Because you do not have to think that much about the content or the framework, for example, data migration workshops, because you get the templates and get an idea what points to cover. And there are a lot of workshop templates and also the whole project life cycle is put into stages there and touchpoints are assigned at some stages.

So that is really good.

Neil Benson: [00:29:31] Yeah, good. I'll have to check it out. Was this project one of the ones for which you were awarded or recognized as a FastTrack solution architect?   

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:29:40] Yeah, I think it was because the second go-live was at the 1st of January, 2020. And I got the award the first time in 2020, and now got the second one this year.

Neil Benson: [00:29:59] That's something I just discovered recently is that the FastTrack recognition just lasts for one year. 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:30:05] There is an reassessment every year to check if you're still aligned with all those goals and so on. And then you will get this one for another year.

Neil Benson: [00:30:18] So how did the reassessment compare to the first assessment in the first place?  It's got some interviews, checking the portfolio of your work, and everything. Is that the same process a second time? 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:30:30] From my perspective, not that detailed, but they check all the assigned projects from the background. And they also check with the assigned solution architects, if everything is in line. And yeah, this is more background checks than the in-person interviews. 

Neil Benson: [00:30:53] Good stuff. I'm really impressed with the FastTrack Recognized Solution Architect program. I think it's a great recognition of the people who are doing really good work on those bigger projects, working with bigger partners. 

The number of certifications that are available these days, there's a lot of pressure on everybody to go and keep their certifications up to date. And the certifications don't show that you have really any experience. Whereas the FastTrack recognition demonstrates that very effectively. It's not very easy to scale that program. I think they'll only ever be 20 or 30 architects recognized each year through the FastTrack program, but that's a good thing, I think. 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:31:34] Yeah, it's a small group, even for F&O it is even smaller than for Customer Engagement apps or the Power Platform. So we are as small group I think of 16 or something like that.

Neil Benson: [00:31:48] Congratulations, that's And you're also a Microsoft MVP award winner at around the same time in 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:31:54] Yeah. 2021 was a good year for me except for COVID of course. But there, I also got this MVP award for my contribution work, most likely on ALM topics, some speaking events, and a lot of blogging.

Neil Benson: [00:32:14]  We'll make sure we include all your social media links and link to your WordPress blog well. What are your what kinds of topics are you working on these days, Paul? Any more virtual conferences, projects you're working on in the background that you can tell us 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:32:26] Yep. I'm currently working on a feature that is currently in private, not private, public preview. It is called Inventory Visibility add-in, and this is an approach to scale-out some requests from the ERP database to the Dataverse so that if a webshop or another third party application needs inventory, or on hand information, they can request that one from Dataverse and not directly from the ERP database and this is to get the pressure down there on the ERP database.

Neil Benson: [00:33:07]  It's fascinating to see the new wave of integration between Finance and Operations and Dataverse and how the Dynamics team is making of the Dataverse platform. I can't wait to see more innovation coming out of that team in the next year or two.

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:33:22] Yeah, that's extremely cool. And also for the scale-out or carve-out perspective, if you have simply too much load on your ERP database, or ERP environment, that you have the ability to scale that one over to Dataverse is perfect.

 Neil Benson: [00:33:42] Paul, thank you so much for joining us on the Amazing Applications. I've been fascinated by this story of, what I consider to be a pretty large scale Finance and Operations deployment, certainly from the very early days of its cloud availability and some of the success you've had with it and the recognition that it's brought you as well. So congratulations on all of that. Thanks so much for joining us. 

Paul Heisterkamp: [00:34:01] Thanks for having me.

Neil Benson: [00:34:06] That was Paul Heisterkamp from GWS in Germany. Thanks Paul, for sharing your Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations story on the Amazing Apps show. We really appreciate you and appreciate the time you've taken to share your story with us. 

Just as we were recording this episode, James Phillips announced the publication of the Success by Design implementation guide. It's a detailed document, 700 pages of best practices for deploying Dynamics 365, based on the experience and expertise of the Microsoft FastTrack engineers working alongside partners like GWS and their enterprise customers. 

There are also several Success By Design resources available on the Microsoft Learn website. It starts with a one hour overview and then two learning paths. One for Customer Engagement and another for Finance and Operations. They cover topics such as creating blueprints, data models, integration plans, user experience strategies, application lifecycle management strategies, and lots more. Search for on Microsoft Docs for Success By Design.

I've also included links in the show notes, which you'll find at customery.com/033.

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