4 Steps to Enable Environment Routing

Reading Time: 3 minutes

In the last post, I mentioned the challenges of the default environment and why the environment routing was needed.

If you haven’t read that, please do read it and return to this post.

We often do things without understanding why. In this case, it’s crucial to understand the challenges before enabling Environment routing. Also, environment routing may not be for you, which is fine.

If you think it’s for you, then continue.

Okay, I assume you read the previous post and are happy to learn how to😀.

In this post, we will talk about how to enable environment routing. 

All you need to do is four steps to enable the environment routing in Power Platform.

Enable Environment Routing

Step 0: Create an Environment Group and publish the rules.

The environment group acts as a basket where you can group all your environments and apply rules only to those environments.

Open https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/environmentGroups And Click on a new group to create a group.

In the picture below, I am creating a developer environments group, which will group all the maker’s developer environments.

4 Steps to Enable Environment Routing in Power Platform - Environmnet Grouping

Once the group is created, make sure you publish the rules associated with the group.

As of now, you have 6 rules available provided by Microsoft.

You can learn how to configure the rules here.

4 Steps to Enable Environment Routing in Power Platform - Environmnet Rules

Once that is done, it’s time for everyone to have developer environments.

Step 1: Enable developer environments from Tenant settings.

Go to the Tenant Settings https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/tenantsettings

Click on Developer environment assignments and set it for everyone.

4 Steps to Enable Environment Routing in Power Platform - Default environment assignments

Now, everyone in the organization can create a developer environment.

It’s time to enable the Environment routing feature.

Step 2: Enable Environment Routing and select the Environment Group.

In the Tenant settings https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/tenantsettings click on Environment routing.

This gives you a few options.

All Makers (Or) New Makers Only:

Based on your requirements, you can enable this only for new makers or makers already building solutions.

Environment Group:

This is the group you created in Step 0.

Once an environment is created, it will be associated with this group, and the rules will be applied according to your configuration.

Security Group:

You can limit this environment routing only for a specific group of people or enable it for everyone.


4 Steps to Enable Environment Routing in Power Platform

Test Environment Routing

It’s time to test.

You can test it with the help of new or existing makers. Ask them to access the maker portal.

Step 3: Access make.powerapps.com with a new maker or existing maker.

And wait for the environment to be created.

4 Steps to Enable Environment Routing in Power Platform Target state

The environment automatically gets added to the group.

All the published rules are applied to the developer environment.

Summary

In this post, you learned how to enable the Environment routing and Test the functionality.

Based on your company’s requirements, you could Test with a few people and allow only new makers.

Once you are happy with the testing, you can enable it for all makers and larger groups within the company.

What do you think of the environment routing feature?

Why Environment Routing – Power Platform Governance at Scale

Reading Time: 7 minutes

If you’re lucky, at least one dedicated admin will be there to manage the Power Platform. Many companies might not have a dedicated admin at the beginning of their Power Platform journey. Power Platform admins might be working on other projects and managing the platform. 

A few years back, there were no dedicated Power Platform admin roles. The good thing is it’s now changing.

You might ask, why do you need a dedicated admin role to manage the platform?

In a company, there could be 10s. 100s or even 1000s of people making solutions. 

The admin is trying to help all these people develop solutions securely. 

Also, admin is the glue between all other departments, such as the organization’s Security, Legal, privacy, and business teams. 

Developer Environments:

Admin in most of the organization’s tenants, developer environments, and assignments will be turned off, which means only specific admins will create environments. This means that they will have less work to manage environments securely.

More environments = more work for the admins.

This is to stop the sprawling of many environments that get created. 

Then, there are other settings available for the tenant. 

A green icon appears at the bottom of Tenant settings, indicating that this setting applies to Managed environments.

We will talk more about Managed environment features in future posts. 

Managed environments are premium governance features of Power Platform.

This blog post aims to talk about the challenges of governance on a large scale.

If you are starting with Power Platform, this post may not be important for you.

Are you still keen to read 🙂

Let us understand how people are developing solutions in the real world.

How people build solutions

Let’s take an example. 

Alex is one of the company’s existing makers, and most people visit the maker portal (make.powerapps.com) to develop solutions using Power Platform.

Alex might have watched a video on YouTube or heard someone else say it is a great low-code tool.

Maker is someone who is developing solutions and solving business problems using Power Platform.

Whenever someone logs into the Maker portal, they’re automatically redirected to the default environment, and 99% of them don’t realize they’re in it. 

Then, they start clicking on all the available links. That’s how any business user does it and develops those applications.

Once they build an app, they can start sharing it with everyone. Nothing is stopping them. This is a major challenge for admins. 

People like Alex—let’s say we have 100 People now. All 100 people will develop solutions in the default environment and then share them with some larger groups or the whole organization. 

Imagine you have 1000 People and 10,000 People doing the same thing. 

That would be heaps of the solutions within the default environment.

Don’t get me wrong. It is good for people to develop solutions. The only concern here is they are doing it without knowing they are all in one environment.

There is also another challenge with this approach: 

On the other side, many of the solutions that people are building will not be shared with the people, which means many of them will be unused. 

Moreover, potentially, those unused apps and flows will die. 

And as an admin, you’re the only person managing all this stuff. 

Once you get more active users, because you want everyone in the business to be involved, try to build solutions and solve the problems within the company. 

The video shows the default maker experience.

To summarize, below are the challenges with Default Environment

  • Everyone in the org can build solutions.
  • Unused Apps and Flows.
  • Can’t delete the environment
  • Did I miss anything? (Please add it to the comments)

Microsoft’s product team understood these challenges and suggested some of the best practices.

Best Practices

  • Rename the Default environment to personal productivity.

That means you are telling people to use the Default environment only for personal solutions. Do not build solutions for your department or company. 

Many people don’t realize that they have multiple environments. As soon as they land in the default environment, they click these buttons and start building solutions.

Renaming the default environment to Personal Productivity is still a good practice, but it doesn’t stop people from building solutions.

The other best practice would be restricting the connectors within the default environment. 

  • Minimum number of connectors

You can minimize the number of connectors available in the Default Environment.

You could choose only the standard connectors, giving you more control.

This would reduce the number of solutions created to a certain extent, but it would not solve the problem.

  • Cleanup the orphaned solutions

You need to clean up some of the flows or the solutions that are not being used.

Either using automation or creating a process.

This needs to be an ongoing process to keep the environment tidy.  

  • Reactive monitoring of solutions

All these best practices are somewhat reactive to what’s happening.

So what is react to governance?

Reactive Governance

Once makers build applications, they can share them with large groups and everyone in the organization.

And makers might not follow the guidelines. Deploy those solutions without any quality checks. 

As an admin, you use tools like the starter kit, review those solutions, and then ask the makers for more information. 

  • Why have you shared with everyone? 
  • Can we use a different environment for different processes? 
  • You should have followed these things. 
  • And did you check our existing guidelines?

As an admin, you react to everything that has happened before. 

It’s easy to react if you have few makers within your organization or even 100 of them. 

But let’s say you have thousands of them, building many solutions. There is a limit to reactive governance. 

That’s one of our significant challenges, especially if you have a large user base.

In a nutshell, Rective governance is:

First Makers:

Shared solutions with large groups and Everyone

Not following the guidelines for High impact solutions

Deployed solutions without quality checks

Then Admin:

Review solutions and ask makers for more Info

Provide the guidelines and process that need to be followed

If something breaks, check the quality of solutions and help in remediation

Also, you need to understand the path of the platform’s admins.

How did they become admins in the first place?

Everyone’s Path to administration is different

In my case, I studied Electrical and Electronics, then started working on.Net and SharePoint. 

I was introduced to the power platform early in 2018, and now I know a bit about it.

However, most admins come to the power platform from different backgrounds. 

Some admins end up with the Power Platform because they manage other platforms, such as SharePoint. They’ll end up supporting or managing the Power Platform. 

Also, in the early stages of a company, people start using a platform without noticing they are using a power platform. 

When I say without noticing, most of the SharePoint and M 365 have a baseline license, so they could build solutions using those licenses.

 You may not see much growth, or many other teams will build solutions. 

The growth would pick up slowly after a few years. If you started in 2018, for example, and it’s been five to six years, you will see more growth in Power Platform.

How to manage the growth of these applications?

Or

How do we even know there are applications within the platform?

Challenges with Starter Kit

There was no CoE starter kit before 2019. You need to run PowerShell scripts to get the platform inventory.

The Microsoft team released the kit in 2019, and everyone can see what exactly is in the tenant.

There was always a surprise when they installed a starter kit. 

Before the starter kit, it was always like they lacked visibility.

While managing the starter kit, consider a few things that will help you manage it better.

The visibility of all the Platform components helped many companies to plan and adopt the Power Platform accordingly.

The starter kit also improved quite a lot over the years. 

Vode shows a high-level overview of the CoE Starter Kit – Power Platform Admin View App.

If I’m not wrong, it’s been over five years, and many features have been added. 

One of the standard apps in the starter kit is the Power Platform admin view app. It’s one of my go-to apps for the admins to understand the applications built by makers. 

When I tried installing the May 2019 version, it got only 100 objects within the code solution. In 2024, they got over 400. 

That means it’s pretty much the starter kit grown more than four times.

The other day, I was trying to automate the enrollment request process, and we were trying to add environments to the DLP. I struggled to automate the process, and my teammate said there was already a flow that added enjoyment to DLP. So why not use that? It is always quite challenging to keep up with the changes

With the Microsoft team releasing the new features in the starter kit, you need a dedicated person to manage the changes and everything else that happens. It’s pretty challenging.

In short, below are the challenges: 

  • Reactive governance
  • Upgrade and maintain tool kit every three months
  • Keep up with the changes to the tool kit

Platform Growth

In the future, with AI and copilot, everything happening will allow people to create many of those solutions, apps, and flows with prompts. Can you imagine how much growth is going to happen?

I might be guessing (who knows the future??)

Whatever we have seen in the last five years could happen in the next one or two years. This slider can be moved towards the extreme side.

I don’t know, but it depends on adoption. It’s always better to look ahead. 

With all these challenges in the default environment, you might be better off planning using Environment routing features.

Summary

In this post, we have discussed the challenge with the Default environment at a large scale.

Even with best practices from Microsoft, managing the default environment is challenging.

The starter kit does help us understand what we have in the tenant, but it is still a reactive governance approach. Managing solutions is a big challenge, especially with hundreds or thousands of makers developing solutions to solve their problems. 

Environment routing aims to solve governance challenges on a scale.

Note: Environment routing is part of the managed environment feature, which means it is premium. 

In the next part, I will show how to start with Environemnt routing, groups and rules. 

Are you using Managed environment features? Please let me know if you have any comments or feedback.

Managed Environments at the Scottish Power Platform User Group

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I had an opportunity to speak at the Scottish Power Platform User Group on Managed environments.

Below is the Agenda of the session and recording:

This particular session was a bit of a challenge for me given that it was at 2 AM my time.

The recording also got Nathan Rose and Charles Sexton sessions on low code plugins, Power Fx.

Feel free to watch the session and let me know if you have any feedback.

Plan to write every day for the next 90 days

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I plan to write every day for the next 90 days about Power Platform Strategy, governance and adoption.

​Here are a few reasons why:

​1) My work is to govern and manage the Power Platform.

​2) Keen to connect with like-minded people.

​3) Establish an online presence, which I ignored for some time.

​Join me on this adventure—and let me know if you have any questions along the way!

​I’m excited to continue sharing what I know online.

If you want to get notified, you can enter your email below.

I will consolidate the posts and send them weekly.

Topics i will try to cover

When thinking about power platform strategy, governance, and adoption, many topics could be covered.

I will try to start with some foundational/core topics at a high level.

If it creates interest then i am happy to go in details.

  • Define strategy and goals
  • The current state of the platform
  • Power Platform Team
  • Centre of excellence
  • Environment strategy
  • DLP Strategy
  • Security Strategy
  • Governance Tools
  • Starter kit and customizations
  • Application life cycle management
  • Platform monitoring
  • Application Support and maintenance
  • License Strategy
  • Training
  • Coaching
  • Guidelines
  • Review of the applications
  • New Feature process

Any specific topics I missed here?

I will also expand on some of the forum questions I answered last few months.

Please do let me know in the comments or DM me on LinkedIn.

Speaking at ANZ CoE user group – Managed Environments

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I will speak at ANZ CoE user group this month (24th April 2024).

The topic is Managed environments (Governance at scale using Managed environments and the starter kit).

I will do my best to share the knowledge I gained from my experience governing and administering the Power Platform.

I wrote a few recent posts on starter kit considerations and common mistakes.

My session is mainly targeted towards platform administrators.

There will be something for everyone looking at managed environments.

We have been using Managed environments at work for the last few months.

I have also installed starter kits for many tenants and guided them through the core strategies of Power Platform.

With the evolution of tools and features available for admins, it is important to understand why Managed environments.

Content

Below is the planned agenda.

– Why Manage environments and most importantly when to enable.
– What is available now
– Preview features
– Starter kit and how it works with Managed environments
And a demo of how it all works together.

As you read, a starter kit will be an integrated part of managing the platform and other tools such as PowerShell and BYODL.

Based on the content planned, is there anything else I should add?

Please let me know in the comments below.

Or Feel free to DM me on LinkedIn.

Event Details

The event is online. You can register using the link below and attend on April 24th, 2024.

Link to the event.

Pros and Cons of Developer Environments

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With the release of the groups and rules (Preview), it is important to consider the developer environments as part of the strategy.

Below is the list of pros and cons(Limitations).

I also added a few things you need to take into consideration.

Pros

Every developer environment comes with a message that indicates the purpose of the environment.

When the user tries to share the apps, it shows the below message to the App owner.

Users can create up to 3 developer environments. If they start developing solutions, you don’t have to manage/provision for them every time.

Newly created developer environments can become managed environments. This is to support the environment routing. This feature is currently in preview.

Developer environments don’t affect tenant database quota.

With routing, you can apply preconfigured settings such as Sharing Limits, Solution Checker, Usage Insights, and Maker welcome message.

New makers don’t need to know which environment they need to work on.

Cons (Limitations)

You will have less control over the naming conventions of the environments.

Flow runs/month (750) and capacity limits up to 2 GB.

Environments created using the Power Apps Developer Plan that have been inactive for the last 90 days will be deleted after the environment owners are notified.

There are a few more things to consider

You must enable Tenant level settings (Developer environment assignments) to leverage the developer environments.

Developer environment assignments

You do not need to make default as a managed environment to enable the routing.

All developer environments created through environment routing are managed environments, as are all environments in a group. These environments require premium licenses to run Microsoft Power Platform assets.

Please create the comms to communicate the consequences with users, which will help you manage it properly.

Developer environments add more values once the environment routing becomes GA.

Common mistakes upgrading the CoE Starter kit and how to avoid them

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In the last post, I shared 10 things to consider before installing the CoE starter kit.

If you do not consider those things, you will have a lot of issues managing the starter kit.

Also, people make common mistakes while maintaining the starter kit.

I have made some of these mistakes and seen others make similar mistakes.

Hopefully, after reading these, you can learn from our mistakes and not repeat them.

But you need to ask why they are happening.

Why are mistakes happening when upgrading the CoE starter kit?

The starter kit is not a simple tool to manage.

Here is why.

We are trying to automate the environment request process.

I was struggling to automate adding environments to DLP.

I am trying the Power Platform admin V2 connector action.

But my teammate said we have it already as part of the tool.

I was like what? How did I miss it?

Then we used the child flow to complete the automation.

You might have faced similar kinds of challenges.

To put this in context, how large was the starter kit?

At a high level, there are three main components

1) core components

2) Audit or Governance components

3) Nurture components

I am ignoring the other one for now (Innovation backlog). This component didn’t get much attention.

As of April 2024 release

Core components got

  • 423 Total Objects
  • 49 Tables
  • 15 Power Apps
  • 110 Cloud Flows
  • 63 Pages

Audit components

  • 42 components
  • 1 Table
  • 3 Power Apps
  • 12 Cloud Flows
  • 8 Pages

Nurture components

  • 74 components
  • 15 Tables
  • 3 Power Apps
  • 8 Cloud Flows
  • 7 Pages

Note: I will try to update this metric once a quarter. Let me know if you read this article in the future and it hasn’t been updated for over three months.

Starter is a great tool that adds value to managed environments.

But it needs effort from the Power Platform team to manage it.

It is easy to make mistakes if you do not know what you are customizing.

If you do not know how to use the kit efficiently,

Now you know why. Let us get into the list of these mistakes.

The list below is not in any particular order.

Immediate CoE starter kit upgrade Post-Release

The starter kit team releases the updates once a month.

If you upgrade to a new release without waiting for initial bugs to be identified and fixed. It can cause issues if there are any critical problems present.

Give yourself a few days to a week to check that the kit updates are not significantly flawed.

Not doing Testing

Not testing newly released components in the development environment before production use can introduce unexpected issues.

This happens mainly because of the lack of a dedicated development environment.

You need to have a development environment to test the released updates.

If you use any email functionality, enable an admin account email and start testing with a few users. Make sure the emails are working as expected. You do not want to email everyone in the organization even by mistake.

Overlooking Starter Kit’s Full Functionality

Failing to invest time in understanding all solutions and components in the starter kit can lead to building custom solutions that are not required.

Make sure you give yourself time to understand all the components. If not, you will build something not required.

Not updating the starter kit frequently

You must update the CoE starter kit at least once every three months.

Otherwise, managing the starter kit may experience many unexpected issues.

It’s even better to upgrade the starter kit at least once every two months.

Document everything, and this makes it easier to do future upgrades.

Too many customizations and not having conversations with the Starter kit team

People customizing the starter kit functionality is common.

While customization, it’s always better to be in touch with a starter kit to understand the roadmap rather than building a custom component.

The component you are building might already be planned in a few months, and then you can always wait and focus on other areas.

Go to the starter kit Project in GitHub and check the plans for the next few months.

You can also request a feature in GiHub and see what the starter kit team says. They can guide you on whether to build it or not.

Final Thoughts

Installing a starter kit alone is not enough.

Maintaining the starter kit is essential.

The starter kit is the primary tool for understanding the current state of the power platform.

Make sure you do not make these mistakes while maintaining the starter kit.

Often reflect on what went well and what didn’t.

Keep a list of all the issues that happened so you can track their progress and the lessons learned.

Hopefully, you will make fewer mistakes as you learn and reflect often.

Let me know in the comments some of the common mistakes you have seen.

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Posts

4 Steps to Enable Environment Routing

Why Environment Routing – Power Platform Governance at Scale

Managed Environments at the Scottish Power Platform User Group

Plan to write every day for the next 90 days

Speaking at ANZ CoE User group on Managed Environments

Pros and Cons of Developer Environments

Common mistakes in upgrading the CoE Starter kit

10 things to consider before installing the CoE Starter Kit

My Thoughts on 90 Day Mentoring Challenge by Mark Smith

Understanding the current state of the Power Platform

Power Pages and AI (Copilot) Learning Plan

My Journey to IT (Power Platform)

Why listen to me

Contact

About

10 things to consider before installing the CoE Starter Kit

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The starter kit is crucial in understanding the Power Platform’s current state.

It answers some of the important questions about the platform and people.

  • Who is developing solutions?
  • Where they are developing solutions?
  • How many solutions?

It also answers many other questions about your Power Platform’s current state.

Why checklist?

I have installed/upgraded starter kit over 60 to 70 times in the last few years for multiple tenants.

If you are wondering how come these many times I installed/upgraded?

Last year alone I installed/upgraded over 20 times in Development and Production environments.

I am also responsible for managing the starter kit in my current role.

The checklist helps me avoid mistakes whenever I install/upgrade the kit to a new tenant or maintain the current one.

The goal of this post is to avoid the mistakes you might make.

Below are some key elements to get the starter kit up and running.

Note: This is not a complete list, but having the checklist prevents me from making mistakes later.

1. Cloud export vs BYODL (Preview)

Cloud Export

If you are a small org, you should use Cloud Export.

If you are starting, this option should be used regardless of the number of people using the platform.

BYODL (Preview) – bring your own Data lake is still in preview

It was introduced to support extensive usage and speed up the inventory process. For whatever reason, it is still in preview.

In this guide, I will talk only about the Cloud Export option.

2. Environments

You need at least two environments to start the installation.

Make sure to configure the settings below in each environment.

This can be done from the Admin command center App.

Development environment

FullInventory = No

ProductionEnvironment = No

(This setting prevents people from receiving emails)

Production environment

FullInventory = Yes

ProductionEnvironment = Yes

Optional – You can also use the UAT environment, but it’s overkill.

3. DLP Policy

Create a dedicated DLP policy.

Given the number of connectors needed to get the starter kit up and running, it’s always recommended to have a dedicated policy for CoE.

Make sure you are allowing only starter kit Development and Production environments. Not any other environments.

4. Service account

To configure the starter kit use the service account option.

This is one of the mandatory requirements for the kit to be up and running.

It’s the backbone of platform governance and administration.

You should not use the individual user account, and if the person leaves the org, you will have to configure the kit again.

This should be mail-enabled so you can receive emails when flows get errors.

5. Licensing

The Cloud Export option needs a minimum of the below licenses.

Make sure you assign these to the service account.

  • Office 365 E3 (minimum)
  • Power Apps premium
  • Power Automate premium
  • Power BI Pro or per capacity.

6. Office 365 Groups

A makers group is necessary to add people building apps to this group.

Ensure you disable the setting that sends a welcome email when a person is added to the group. Otherwise, people get Spammed when they are added to the group.

You could potentially add the people to the Yammer group as well.

7. App registration

Create an App registration in the Azure portal with sufficient permissions to get the Audit Log info.

8. Documentation

Before you start the installation, start documenting everything.

While you are installing, take the screenshots (Before and After).

Make sure you capture all the steps while installing the kit.

If you get stuck, take a screenshot and capture the error logs.

Once you fix the issue, come back and update the doc with the root cause.

Repeat these every time you upgrade the kit.

This will save you hours and hours.

Also, maintain the details on what version you are installing, the status, and when you installed it.

This helps you track the components you are installing and upgrading.

9. Be Patient

Your tenant’s full inventory could take 24 to 48 hours, if not more. Relax and wait for the flows to complete the initial inventory.

10. Validate

Power Platform Admin view

Open the app and see if the data is getting populated for all the components.

Admin command center App

If you need help getting inventory.

Open this app and check for the Inventory Tab under cloud flows, see each flow’s status, and ensure everything is running without failure.

If there are any failures, fix them or raise a bug with the starter kit Github repository.

Key Notes

You do not have to install and configure all the components.

Start with core components.

And

Most importantly, do not enable all flows, especially the ones that will send emails.

HELPER – Send Email

Adding users to the group

Leverage wizard

You can install individual starter kit components using the Starter ki wizard app.

Again, do not enable all the flows( You could potentially SPAM all users in the company).

Final Thoughts

The CoE starter kit is the backbone of understanding why, what and where.

Also, the critical thing to know is that the Starter kit itself is not enough.

You’re mistaken if you think you have a starter kit and everything is done.

It is just a starter kit and you need more processes and systems to manage the platform.

You need to work with people to create those processes and systems.

CoE starter kit # CoE

Next up, we will talk about common mistakes made by admins while configuring the starter kit.

Is this checklist helpful or do you have a question?

Let me know in the comments below.

References

Github Repo to log issues and get new release updates

Complete guide from MS Learn to Install and configure starter kit

If you liked this post, consider signing up to get future posts.

My Thoughts on 90 Day Mentoring Challenge by Mark Smith

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I joined the 2024 Q1 90-day mentoring challenge by Mark Smith. 

We are very close to the end of this cohort (28th March 2024). We completed the last Q and A session today. 

I am sharing my thoughts in this blog post. 

I also joined the program a few years back but for some reason, I didn’t use it properly. 

I wanted to make amends this time. 

Why did I join this time?

I couldn’t make the best use of the challenge last time. 

Maybe I wasn’t ready for it.

I was too busy with other things in my life. 

This time though, I am ready.

When the student is ready the teacher appears

Lao Tzu

I am an independent consultant. I wanted to learn how people from other locations work and get things done.

I wanted to learn from Mark. He has extensive experience working with people around the globe and a wealth of knowledge. 

Most importantly, I wanted to write online and build a network with like-minded people. 

How I made the decision

I am getting emails from Mark and a notification from Dani.

Given that I was on the waiting list, I am getting messages about who joined the program.

Heaps of people joined the program. 

I know many people from the community who are writing and making an impact.

They did not know me at that time.

Of course, now they know me 😁

I wasn’t ready as I was waiting for my current work situation to get finalized. 

Once that was clear. I decided to join the challenge and learn from everyone part of the challenge.

First few weeks

I am a slow starter like a Test match player. I need time to get in, I’m not a typical T20 person who can hit from the beginning. 

Oops, sorry if you didn’t understand, it is a cricket (sports game) analogy.

Everyone is sharing the intro videos and I am getting to know more and more people in the community.

All of them have different careers and experiences.

It is great to connect with everyone on LinkedIn.

Sorry if you are in the current cohort and I didn’t connect. Please connect with me on LinkedIn.

What’s connecting all of us?

#90-day mentoring challenge. 

As the content got rolling out, people started doing the exercises. 

It’s great to see everyone making progress. 

I am late to start the things as I am trying to complete other things. 

But, it was great to see everyone around making progress.

You will learn a lot from the program.

What do you learn?

How to communicate with others.

Improve your communication skills. This includes writing and speaking. 

The quote on writing with Warren Buffett’s picture inspired me. 

You learn consulting skills.

How to use design thinking at work and in conducting workshops.

UI and UX, AI.

My favorite module. Personal Branding. 

There are more modules, and the content will be updated.

You can see the curriculum here for more details. Mark explained better than me.

Books

You will get many book recommendations from the program that was read by Mark every year.

Also from the community.

You can progress professionally and personally if you read and apply a few.

My favorite book on the list is Radical Candor by Kim Scott. 

What’s more you can learn?

Having direct access to Mark. This is a game-changer for this program.

QA Sessions

This is the best part for me and many others who always look forward to connecting with Mark and everyone else in the cohort.

Listening to questions people ask and learning from others.

Mark also encourages everyone to share their thoughts.

The good thing is, that you get access to all the QA sessions to learn from others.

You might face similar challenges to those others are facing. 

These sessions also get recorded, so you can refer to them later.

What I did since joining the 90-day challenge

Starterd writing on LinekdIn. 

I started answering questions in Power Platform forums. 

I also started learning Power Pages

Now, currently blogging my thoughts.

I will be doing a speaking engagement next month (April 2024) in the ANZ CoE user group.

What else?

Did a Podcast with Mark (will be releasing soon). 

I am planning to do things for the next three months in advance, which is something you will learn as part of the program.

Why You Should Join

There are many reasons why you should join.

  • Making Friends across the globe.
  • Supporting each other.
  • You can ask questions and learn from experts.
  • You get inspired by other people. 
  • It is a safe place to share stories, emotions, and frustrations.
  •  Actionable content that solves real-world challenges.
  • Everyone is happy for others to succeed.
  • Honest conversations and no BS.
  • Connections that will last forever.
  • This is an opportunity to ask questions and gain insights from many people with various work and life experiences.

And so much more.

Final Thoughts

The 90-day mentoring challenge could be a life-changing opportunity.

You collaborate, make connections and friends, and grow with others.

I got so much value from the program and the people who are part of the program.

Thank you, Mark Smith (Linkedin) and Meg Smith (LinkedIn).

Thank you, everyone, for participating in this cohort 2024 Q1. We had some beautiful conversations about business apps, the MVP program, and life.

If you are considering joining, hopefully this post might help you decide. 

Leave a comment if you have a question, and I will try to answer it.