Scaling Innovation and AI at Avanade with Nancie Calder

Nancie Calder [00:00:00]:

I was helping a team in the US today understand how to deliver an AI assessment because AI is so new to everybody, right? We were kind of walking through what, what does the workshop look like? How do you need to prepare? What do you need to learn on Microsoft? Learn. What do you need to learn from. From us internally? Here's the templates. And then I said, you know what? I. I don't just talk about this stuff.

Neil Benson [00:00:21]:

I'm.

Nancie Calder [00:00:21]:

I'm doing it too. Right? I was in a workshop with a client, I took all this material and then I said, here's how I used AI to build the deliverables and we walk through how to use that in our day to day as well.

Neil Benson [00:00:35]:

G' day and welcome to Practice Leading, a podcast for emerging and curious practice leaders of Microsoft partner businesses. If you're anything like me, with an unquenchable thirst for improvement and zero tolerance for bs, you've come to the right place. Hi, I'm Neil Benson and this is my personal invitation for you to join me on my own journey of discovery. Together we'll learn from innovators and investors, executives and entrepreneurs, business leaders and business coaches that have already left their stamp on the Microsoft community and those that are exploring new and smarter ways of building their businesses. Whether it's groundbreaking innovations, hiring high performing teams, or the sheer force of will to disrupt our industry, each episode is a masterclass from the trailblazers who have already achieved significant success. Find Practice Leading on YouTube or visit practiceleading.com and learn from the mentors you wish you had earlier in your career. Today I'm learning from Nancy Calder. Nancy is a Senior Vice President and Global Consulting Practice Lead at Avanade, based in Toronto, Canada.

Neil Benson [00:01:41]:

Nancy is passionate about leading innovation at scale, and that's the focus of our conversation today. She brings three decades of experience from her early days as a freelance consultant and her work at ADX Studio, or all the way to leading a 3000 person strong global team today. Before I met Nancy, I'll have to admit I assumed that global systems integrators like Avanade found innovation challenging and that a disproportionate amount of innovation happens in smaller firms. At least that was my experience working in a GSI as well. But I learned a lot from Nancy in our discussion, and she put forward a really strong case about how larger firms can contribute and create new products, services and approaches both locally and and internationally. We cover the challenges and rewards of scaling a global practice, fostering a culture of continuous learning, and finding creative ways to use AI and Microsoft's latest software and services, both for Avanade's customers and internally in our own team. Here's Nancy.

Nancie Calder [00:02:42]:

So thanks for having me today, Neil. I'm Nancy Calder, based in Toronto, Canada. Really excited to talk about all things related to practice, particularly in Dynamics. I currently work with Avanade, one of the largest GSI's global system integrators. I lead the CRM practice globally. So 3,000 people in our practice of all regions. But, you know, I've come from very humble beginnings as well. Worked with very small practices, worked as a freelancer.

Nancie Calder [00:03:15]:

So I've done a lot of different things. Been involved with CRM since it was before Dynamics back in the 90s. Um, I came to Avanade from ADX Studio, so I was part. I started their professional services practice there. So that's the power pages now. So yeah, been. Been in the channel for a long time and I'm yeah, really excited about it and actually run a mentorship program trying to build more capability within, within our practice because there's just not enough people in the ecosystem.

Neil Benson [00:03:47]:

Awesome. So you and I met recently at MVP Sellot. You had a giant reputation in our industry, so it was awesome to meet you there. What did you think of your first MVP summit?

Nancie Calder [00:03:57]:

It was fabulous. Absolutely. And I'm thrilled that I was bestowed the honor of becoming an MVP this year. So I'm an MVP in contact center customer service. So it was great being in with people who are as passionate as I am about this technology. And I talk to my practice about how every day what we're doing is impacting people's lives because it's impacting the customers that call into contact centers. And we've all done that or we've all chatted with somebody and those poor employees that are at the other end of it who, who take all the abuse from people that are unhappy. Right.

Nancie Calder [00:04:33]:

We're doing, we're doing wonderful things to help them. So yeah, it was a great experience.

Neil Benson [00:04:38]:

Tell me about trying to talk to a moment ago about trying to build the capability within, within your business unit. We're all trying to do the same as leaders of our practice. We're trying to improve the skills and quality of delivery, the people that work with us. But you're going to scale 3,000 people. That's, that's different from, you know, me trying to mentor 20 people team. What's it like at that kind of scale? What kind of programs you have to put in place when you're trying to improve the Quality of delivery for so many people.

Nancie Calder [00:05:02]:

Yeah, I mean it's really interesting to. And we have a lot of different, I mean it's so big. We have a lot of different geographies and languages and so trying to come up with global programs that sort of set, set a level for the different geographies that they can build on and, and customize it for their own needs. I'd say we've, we do that pretty successfully. I'd say the one hurdle is still with Japan. Trying to find stuff for them in their native language can be very challenging. But you know, it's really wonderful building this innovative mindset. And that's what I think we were going to talk about today.

Nancie Calder [00:05:40]:

I used to at Avanade lead our center of Excellence before I took on this practice lead role. And we essentially instill innovation in what people do every day in, in the work that they do. And when we're recruiting where, you know, one of the things I look for when I talk to people is how passionate are they about the technology and what are some, you know, I asked some questions about like what, what kind of things are most interesting to you? What kind of innovations, you know, can you bring to light? What, what do you like to do? So, so I was really interested to talk about this today.

Neil Benson [00:06:15]:

Yeah, great. I always love learning other people's secret interview questions and, and using those. I've got eight open position the moment. So yeah, questions like that really, really help me out. So I appreciate that we talk about innovation. Are your team members helping to develop new products for Avanade that you, that you will sell or improving the ways that you deliver your service? What does innovation mean for Global Systems Integrator?

Nancie Calder [00:06:40]:

Yeah, that's, that's awesome because it's actually multifaceted. It's, it's both things, right? Like I, I was helping a team in the US today understand how to deliver an AI assessment because AI is so new to everybody. Right. So we were kind of walking through what, what does the workshop look like? How do you need to prepare? What do you need to, to learn on Microsoft? Learn. What do you need to learn from, from us internally? Here's the templates. And then I said, you know what? I, I don't just talk about this stuff. I'm, I'm doing it too. Right.

Nancie Calder [00:07:09]:

I was in a workshop with a client. I took all this material and then I said, here's how I used AI to build the deliverables and we walk through how to use that in our day to day as well, so it's about helping the practice learn how to help clients use innovation and things like AI, the things that are inbuilt in the tool that Microsoft's bringing to us. But also how do you use it yourself to do better things and you know, make your own life better? Right. When I talk to clients, it's all about scaling. Like don't be afraid of it. It's about scale and you're adding more capability to do all the people that you have and then you can do more yourself.

Neil Benson [00:07:52]:

How do you think about setting aside time to do things like professional development, innovation, non billable activities? When we work for consulting firms that love to see a full time sheet of billable time, how do you balance that billable versus non billable pressure in a consultancy? Because we can all spend know, 100% of our time on billable work. Revenue looks great, but after you finish a project, your skills are way behind. You know, you haven't, you haven't learned anything for the last year or two and you know, the business goes backwards. How do you balance that? Your business?

Nancie Calder [00:08:26]:

Yeah, I mean we, we allocate a certain amount of time, you know, 40 or 80 hours depending on what level you're at of training time every year. So that's, you know, time that they're allowed to spend to put on their timesheet. Now it's all fine and dandy to say that, but if you're working on something 120%, where do you find the time to do training? We also try to get people incented to do their training. We have a certification drive and we have a reward system for doing certifications. So that certainly helps when there's a little bit of, you know, gamification and a little bit of fun in it. But again, that's why when we're hiring, it's looking for people that are excited about innovation and have a growth mindset and continuous learning because they'll just naturally like maybe pick it up on the weekend or they're, you know, looking at a YouTube video about it just because they're super interested in it. Right. And that's how they, they get their training, if you will.

Neil Benson [00:09:22]:

Yeah. So one of the questions I ask when, when candidates are sitting down is, you know, what have you learned recently? What certifications have you, have you taken recently? What are you excited to learn next? And it's not, I'm not looking for a specific answer, I'm just looking for that, like you said, a sense of passion, excitement, if they seem bored by that question, they're probably not a great fit. You want people who are really on it.

Nancie Calder [00:09:45]:

Yeah. Looking for that growth mindset is huge. People who will evolve and collaborate with others and understand that it's not just about you, but it's actually better to surround yourself with people that know more than you and then that, you know, you all complement each other in being able to have that sort of thinking really helps people succeed.

Neil Benson [00:10:11]:

I think I'm keen to find out how you scale that out because you obviously haven't interviewed and employed 3,000 people yourself. Probably not. Anyway, you're trying to instill this culture, but you're not mentoring every individual in that business unit yourself. You're trying to influence the leadership style of leaders that work for you. How does that work? How do you ensure that what you're trying to get across in terms of learning and innovation is trickling down the organization the right way and balancing that against local needs in certain languages or geographies where there's different demand for different products and services and things as well.

Nancie Calder [00:10:48]:

Yeah. The vision I talked to the practice about is how we want each and every person in the practice to understand that we truly are a global organization. I mean they're, they're influenced locally by their P and L because each geography has their P and L. But how we try to create that global feeling is through. To answer your question about the leadership, I have bimonthly like every two week meetings with Europe and America together so that they can cross learn from each other. You know, I have the global, the center of Excellence. I have the global Learning and Development person. I have, you know, myself, I have the, the marketing, like all the, the global supports that they need.

Nancie Calder [00:11:29]:

And we talk about the programs, we talk about what's going on in their particular geography, what, you know, what project. What did you learn from your last project? How do you, you know, how do you recommend others do the same thing? We do the same thing with APAC a little bit on a smaller scale on the, the opposite week. But we try to bring them, cross pollinate them as well. So that's, you know, it's, it's influencing at that level. But also like I said, I, I try to, you know, practice what I preach and I go and work on projects and try to, you know, work with individuals.

Neil Benson [00:12:02]:

That's cool, that's nice, Nice balance of, of personal experience and then cascading your leadership style down across the organization as well.

Nancie Calder [00:12:10]:

Yeah. And we're, we're currently implementing like I have a mentorship program outside of Avanade in the community, it's been, you know, successful. So we're going to bring the same thing within Avanade and help Avanade get the practitioners connected with each other and allow them. Like, if there's somebody in Portugal who wants to speak better English, we might connect them with somebody from the U.S. or, you know, somebody who's in Canada who's trying to make their French better, might connect them with someone in France, something like that. Do the, you know, do something a little bit more. More than just technology, but we also have communities of practice which are really interesting. So we have different champions who rotate and take the opportunity to take the lead on a particular technology.

Nancie Calder [00:12:57]:

So we have a community practice for contact center. We have a community practice for field service. And people come and attend those things, consume the content. We record everything so they can get access to it later on. So there's lots of opportunities to consume content and keep yourself up to date. So that's how we try to do it.

Neil Benson [00:13:17]:

You mentioned learning the lessons from projects after they've been delivered and capturing what worked well, what didn't work so well, what you might do differently next time. It's really hard to do that, to take a moment to reflect as a team, make some notes, and then for others to discover and find those notes and actually learn from that experience. Do you have a formalized way of doing that that's worked really well. Is that something we should all be.

Nancie Calder [00:13:41]:

Doing often, as I said, innovation. So we're starting to pilot something that we have our learning and development person meet with the key team members from key projects that we've implemented, like 1-800-Flowers as an example. We just implemented CCAS for them. That's a big retailer in the US and the learning and development person interviewed different people and has all of those recordings available. We have transcripts, and then you can use Copilot against the transcripts. So that's what we're starting to build the library of those things. I can't say up until now we've done a very good job because it was almost, as you say, it's a burden at the end of the project to try to capture all those lessons. But if you make it easy for people and get them able to talk about what they've done, people are proud of the work, they want to talk about it and they want to share.

Nancie Calder [00:14:34]:

So I find doing those types of recordings as opposed to getting somebody type it all up is becoming quite successful.

Neil Benson [00:14:41]:

Yeah, that's an interesting way of doing it. I haven't thought about doing that. I love making podcast interviews and using the transcripts and things, but I hadn't thought about interviewing my own team members. I love that idea. As a small business, we have delivered several successful projects. I'm really lucky because I've got the six co founders in my business and so there's always one of us working on the project and we all carry the lessons forward from the previous projects we worked on together. But that knowledge that's trapped in the head of a few early leaders in the business isn't going to last forever. We're going to need to keep those lessons continually being refreshed and shared across the organization.

Neil Benson [00:15:16]:

So I love having this idea of a directory of successful projects people can tap into. Go. I've got a field service project with a client in H Vac and finding out lessons from other similar projects.

Nancie Calder [00:15:27]:

Yeah, we did another thing called the Project Learning series where we did a little bit more traditional training. Again, we try to make the content interesting. So we had people, we did some interviews with people, but it was very much, you know, you sort of clicking through a website, what it does allow you to do is we had like test your knowledge. You know, we took a project, genericized it to ensure we weren't, you know, using any information that was under NDA. So you gotta be careful about that. But that was another, like the interactive content tends to help. But I'm, I'm really excited about using Copilot. Like I, I have so many people because I've been at avanade now over 10 years.

Nancie Calder [00:16:07]:

I have quite a bit of tribal knowledge. Go from here. Right. So people reach out to me all the time. Where did we do a project on this? Or where do we do a project on that? And like, I don't know, I go to Copilot in teams and you know, say, you know, give me something on whatever and it just like pops up a bunch of project information because it's in somebody's drive somewhere. And yeah, it's, it's really showing, you know, people's vulnerabilities when you don't realize you put stuff on your SharePoint, your or your OneDrive and people have access to it sometimes. Right.

Neil Benson [00:16:38]:

I tried to do a similar project when I worked at KPMG here in Australia. Obviously we were. That was a global. It's a global organization. We had Microsoft practices in most regions and territories, but they're all run as separate businesses. And so it's much less of a global business. Than Avanade is. It's a series of local businesses under a network.

Neil Benson [00:16:59]:

And so I set up this project directory and all the other practice leaders could contribute their projects to it. So what skills and people they had. So if I wanted to find a contact center expert in Europe, I could find one through this system. But trying to incentivize or stimulate others to contribute to it was much harder. They all wanted to draw from it. But trying to spend a moment, take 15 minutes, enter your project details in here, that was always a challenge. So how do you. You mentioned early on about incentivizing people and gamifying this idea of building up the knowledge.

Neil Benson [00:17:32]:

Are there some fun stories you can share about ways that you that you've succeeded doing that?

Nancie Calder [00:17:36]:

Well, we have a go orange where we can give points to each other so that that definitely helps and you collect the points and you can get trade them in for you know a not just Avanade swag but with I got like a travel bag or a backpack kind of thing recently from it. So we have those types of things. But the, you know, sort of going back to that, you know, how do you incentivize people in various ways? Like we were talking about the same thing about we're, we're trying to figure out better ways to assign people to projects because we have such large number of people, right. How do we get the right skilled people? And again going back to innovation, some groups within our organization we're saying well, why don't we just have everybody key stuff in about themselves into a, you know, structured database and then we can get it out. Right? Because that's very data versy, isn't it? And I said that that sounds awesome. Why don't, why don't you know we have to create profiles for ourselves so that when we're bidding on projects we include those as part of the proposal. So why don't you know, we should be keeping those up to date. Why don't we put those all in a content library and ask copilot to find people with those skills based on that.

Nancie Calder [00:18:51]:

That would be an incentive to get you off the bench onto a project because you need to your profile up to date, you need to have and you need to have the skills, you need to have taken the training or the certification to put on that profile. So we're really exploring a lot how to use AI in our business.

Neil Benson [00:19:09]:

Yeah, I like that idea of everybody's naturally wants to get onto an exciting project and keep themselves billable and do some great Client work. How do I do that? Well, I need to sell myself internally and through my profile, which I now incentivize to keep up to date with my certifications and unused. Nice, attractive language and all of that idea.

Nancie Calder [00:19:27]:

Yeah, much better than trying to put something in a sort of a constrained database. At least the person can be creative and very good.

Neil Benson [00:19:34]:

Have you done any other kind of formal innovation sessions, hackathons within the business or Innovation Days where you brought people or groups together? Or is it really up to the individuals and small teams to, you know, creating your workshops and new offerings to your customers?

Nancie Calder [00:19:50]:

Yeah, our. So our center of Excellence is the, the tip of the spear for everything that's new within the Microsoft platform. So we have specialists, we have MVPs that are in center of Excellence and actually they did Trisha Sinclair, whom you, whom you know, I know, you know, ran some hackathons in the UK that we're going to rinse and repeat and do in other geographies. So we leverage what the center of Excellence is doing for particular geographies and then let the other geographies know about it so they can choose how to consume that. So Innovation Days has long been something that Avanade has done. We bring clients in to do workshops and help them explore art of the possible in all domains. I mean, that was what attracted me to Avanade in the first place. You know, I'd long worked in CRM practices where we were sort of in our own CRM lane and if we needed to bring in some SharePoint, we had to bring in a SharePoint partner.

Nancie Calder [00:20:53]:

If we needed to bring in, you know, AI, it wasn't AI back then, but data analytics, reporting, like Power BI, we'd have to bring them in. And you know, I thought coming to Avanade was the best of all worlds because we have access to all the folks across the Microsoft stack. Right?

Neil Benson [00:21:11]:

Yeah. Do you ever find any tension with your counterparts in those other workloads? Whether it's modern work, data analytics, contention for resources, only you can't have that person. They're going to be busy.

Nancie Calder [00:21:21]:

Yeah. You know where we find it most interesting now is we don't have a practice for Power Platform.

Neil Benson [00:21:28]:

Right. Okay, that's interesting.

Nancie Calder [00:21:30]:

So Power Platform is a shared set of skills across. So that's where it becomes contentious because generally if you have a modern work driven project, they probably don't need a CRM resource. However, these days they may need a Copilot or a Power Platform PowerApps resource. And that's where we've had definitely had some contention we might see the same thing if, you know, we needed, we were delivering CRM and we weren't using traditional dashboards, but we wanted to bring in a bunch of power bi we'd have to potentially borrow somebody from the data and AI practice and they may have other things that they want them to do that would contribute to their metric. So definitely have some of those overlaps. That can be challenging. But we're currently working on cross practice solution plays which are more oriented to let's use everything in the stack to deliver the best outcomes for clients and pick the right components, the right Lego blocks for the client, the most effective Lego blocks. Because I know I would traditionally try to solve a client challenge with CRM, but maybe we should be using something in teams to do it.

Neil Benson [00:22:47]:

Yes, I'm guilty of the same. Absolutely. I've learned as I've done this a few more times, not to try and solve problems that my particular expertise can solve. Whereas I used to be tempted to try and solve everything. I don't have the luxury of saying, well, that looks more like a modern work kind of solution. Let me introduce our different team. Super aware we don't have that. So I'll just say let me introduce you to another partner or you know, I'll introduce the right folks at Microsoft and they'll help you find another partner.

Neil Benson [00:23:13]:

Learning to walk away is. Yeah, it takes a bit of practice and it's not very comfortable.

Nancie Calder [00:23:18]:

Yeah. And I remember that from those days being in the mid market and when.

Neil Benson [00:23:23]:

It comes to developing the people. Have you had any experience with folks who just don't seem to want to come along on the journey? They're pretty happy with the knowledge that they've acquired, the specialism that they've developed and they're not really interested in learning a lot of new stuff anymore. Do you find a home for those folks in Avanade, they can sit in the corner and retain that specialty or do you have to help them find a place somewhere else in another organization?

Nancie Calder [00:23:48]:

Yeah, I'd say if you're within Avanade and you, you don't have that growth mindset or that innovative part in your, you know, in your genes, so to speak, your genetic makeup. I, I think you'd be hard pressed to stay off the bench because you wouldn't be keeping yourself up to date. You wouldn't be keeping up with our clients. Our clients expect us to understand all the latest and greatest and actually I was approving a deal yesterday and I was talking to the solution architect about it. And she was saying, well they, they just want the basics. They just want the basics. And I said, I know, but the sales qualification autonomous agent that just came out like you're talking about bringing marketing and sales together and if they don't know that this is like potentially on their roadmap, you can't build a process that denies that it's out there. So please.

Nancie Calder [00:24:38]:

And, and I, I had, you know, sent her some, some videos on it so hopefully she consumes that and, but, but it's tough for, you know, it's easy for me. I mean I, I spend lots of time, you know, looking at innovation and I'm trying to lead by example but you know, people have different demands in their day to day so I, I'm a bit fortunate that I, I have the, like, I get pulled in for thought leadership so I, that's part of my job to stay on top of all the latest and greatest.

Neil Benson [00:25:10]:

Well, do all your customers want to stay at the forefront as well? Maybe that's why they engage Avanad. But I was speaking to a candidate yesterday, she's working with a state government agency here in Australia and she's a data analytics expert. She's been asked to move data from all these different data sources into the data warehouse using SQL Server integration services. It's a tried and true data migration technology. It's 20 years old. They have no desire to move to anything more modern, no desire to look at Data Factory or Synapse or any of the fabric tools. They're quite happy where they are on 20 year old technology. And she is sitting there going rusty and not really enjoying it.

Neil Benson [00:25:51]:

And you must have come across customers like that who are pretty happy with the old tried and true technology. They've got again away from those opportunities to work with those customers and say look, we don't really, we can't really serve you. How do you handle that?

Nancie Calder [00:26:06]:

Yeah, no, I mean we would, we would definitely help them but we would try to help them understand the technical depth that they may be accumulating and the propensity that they're going to have to maybe go out of support at some point like come at it from a tco, like a total cost of ownership down the road. And you're paying all this money, you know, Dynamics particularly, you're paying for all these features and you're getting new features all the time. But why wouldn't you want to do more with less? Right. So trying to nudge them along. Although I can say we did A project recently where we proposed a whole bunch of out of the box features field service and the client really just wanted to use Power Platform and build it from scratch. And it was a really push pull for a long time. We had to really prove to them but they were already paying for the licenses. So why would you build something in Power Platform that already exists in first party? So it's, it can, it can definitely be a discussion and it takes some, some time to bring some people along.

Nancie Calder [00:27:14]:

But yeah, I mean we, we meet clients where they are for sure. That's, you know, that's the main thing. But we, we try to help them understand the risks of being where they are and not, not advancing. I mean AI certainly a good example of that because there's many, many, many, many organizations that do not want to take part in that. And I remember you and me being in the room when they told us they were announcing Copilot service Workspace. There was actually a lot of fallout for us from that. Clients did not want to move to something called Copilot.

Neil Benson [00:27:50]:

Yeah, it's fascinating the demand for AI. The other thing I noticed about Avanade, well, there's a big contact center is a good example. So reasonably recently, the last year, two years maybe, Microsoft launched Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Avanade is an example of an organization who's jumped on that opportunity, seems to have skilled up a large number of people, won some of the early customer deals in that space and made a big bet that seems to be paying off. I've met some of your team. They're wonderfully talented and stories like 1-800-Flowers are amazing. Other examples of that, where it has paid off and where it hasn't. There must be some innovations coming from Microsoft, for example, that you've made a bet on as an organization that just haven't had the customer demand that you had expected and you've had to pivot and try something else.

Neil Benson [00:28:35]:

How do you decide which of the big Microsoft innovations to leap upon and build a practice around and which ones to just let simmer and see how it goes?

Nancie Calder [00:28:45]:

Yeah, I mean there was an initiative, well, a couple of things that we tried. Let's talk about the HoloLens in mixed reality, which we tried really hard to break open that market and move it along, but after a year, maybe it was 18 months, we, you know, we just actually it went really. It all happened during COVID So Covid actually helped it sustain itself for a little while, but after Covid it just, you know. Well, if you think about it, that's, you know, we were doing HoloLens mixed reality and Metaverse. Do you remember Metaverse? Metaverse completely overshadowed by generative AI. So we, we, we pulled back from that and repurposed the, the skills of people that were in that area.

Neil Benson [00:29:36]:

Gosh, I hadn't thought about HoloLens for a couple of years. I remember there was a massive deal announced with the US Army. They were going to be training soldiers with, with virtual headsets. And I haven't heard anything about it for a while. Oh, my goodness.

Nancie Calder [00:29:47]:

Yeah, it's like, you know, I think it's announced, but we had a, we had a mixed reality mvp. He was in the room with us in, in Seattle. They don't have that MVP category anymore. But the other one was Collab Apps. Do you remember that? That was, I think that was the precursor to Copilot Studio, quite honestly, because it was the modern work team. The product team actually had some of our team who knew Dataverse come in and help them understand how Dataverse worked. And I think they, you know, it was about how to build power apps, if you will, for probably more HR use case, like frontline worker use cases. But it didn't really go anywhere.

Nancie Calder [00:30:31]:

So that's where the center of excellence, we have them kind of those people lean in to learn and test the waters and see if there's projects. And we don't make a big investment in upskilling of the practice unless we see something material. Now I'll say Contact center was different. We saw Microsoft spend, I think it was $4 billion on nuance. We knew it wasn't going away.

Neil Benson [00:30:56]:

Oh, I see. That was the, that was the trigger in your mind?

Nancie Calder [00:30:58]:

Yeah, it was substantial. It was, you know, now, I mean, back in the day when I was with ADX Studio, they bought Parature, they bought Marketing Pilot. So doesn't always mean their bets will succeed either. But I think we still see a little bit of those tools in our. What was the other one?

Neil Benson [00:31:18]:

There was a gamification one that they bought as well, and it disappeared. These are fairly minor acquisitions in the grand scheme of Microsoft's career. But yeah, not every bet pays off.

Nancie Calder [00:31:28]:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's about testing. We have a group, I mean, we're lucky, right? We have a group that does addressable market analysis for us as well, to figure out what is Microsoft's addressable market, what is the services addressable market, you know, what's our market share, what's Microsoft's market share? That you know, Salesforce is still 40 + percent of the market and Microsoft's like 4 or 5. Like we're still, we're still really far behind.

Neil Benson [00:31:59]:

Well, I, yeah, that stat used to bother me. It doesn't so much anymore because I think Microsoft's done a great job of redefining business applications where Salesforce seems to have stuck on service, marketing and sales. They haven't got this custom low code, no code application development platform that Microsoft has. But you know, if you look at the number of seats of PowerApps, number of people using PowerApps every day compared to the number of people using Salesforce Every day, PowerApps has runaway success. You know, I'll take my hat off to Salesforce. They've got an amazing organization, done really well.

Nancie Calder [00:32:31]:

Yeah, I mean, we're studying that right now for the practice because we have our parent companies. Well, one's Accenture and one's Microsoft. Right. So we're looking at how Accenture implements Salesforce and trying to learn from how they do that. Because their loaded cost rates, like our billing rates. Well, we have our loaded cost rates plus margin. Their loaded cost rates for Salesforce are significantly like, I mean, significantly lower than ours. It's the same people really.

Nancie Calder [00:33:03]:

Right. So it's the same type of people. So we're trying to, we think they largely implement out of the box and we maybe overcomplicate things by giving all the options and all the add ons and we need to get to the out of the box piece and then follow it up with the other pieces later.

Neil Benson [00:33:21]:

Interesting. I ran a customer engagement practice in California that was both Microsoft and Salesforce and the Salesforce practice was probably slightly bigger and I didn't find it any difference in the cost rate. In fact, it was probably slightly higher. It was harder to find, there was greater competition for Salesforce consultants. So it's probably having to pay higher salaries and that led to higher costs, certainly higher billing rates as well. But yeah, I don't recall a massive difference in the complexity of the projects. But interesting that that's a different story at Accenture and Avanade.

Nancie Calder [00:33:51]:

Yeah, well, we've got to, we've got to figure it out because often we have what we call a Chinese wall where Avanade will bid it and the Accenture will bid it. We'll bid it with, you know, Microsoft will want us to bid Dynamics and then Accenture will want to bid Salesforce. So if we go head to head, we need to be able to win because it should theoretically be the same amount of work.

Neil Benson [00:34:10]:

Thinking about some of the culture of organizations. Avanad made a few strategic kind of acquisitions of other Microsoft partner organizations brings in a whole new slew of people with different experiences and learning styles. Do you have a way of assimilating those people and helping them join the Avanade culture and become orange quickly, or do you just kind of leave them to it and see how they go and let them slowly become acclimatized? How does that work when it is a whole new group of people joining at one?

Nancie Calder [00:34:39]:

Every acquisition has been a little bit different and I think the differences identify how successful they're going to be. And I think it's a bit of the organization coming in, how big they are, how how different their culture is from Avanaut. I think the more successful ones have definitely had that innovative culture in their organization. So it's on a case by case basis that we try to bring them in, try to make them orange, like you said, give them access, be inclusive and bring them into all of our team meetings. But some have gone not that great.

Neil Benson [00:35:21]:

I think the folks making those acquisitions, you know, your corporate business development team, they look at the acquisition of the partner that they're acquiring and whether they have that innovation culture plays a part in the decision making. Should we go ahead or not? I wonder if that plays a role in whether or not that acquisition gets done.

Nancie Calder [00:35:41]:

I'm guessing not. I don't know, but I'm guessing not. I'm sure it's a lot about the numbers.

Neil Benson [00:35:47]:

Yeah. Okay, Nancy, let's wrap it up with a quick summary of where we got to. I love your focus on innovation. You're doing learning days and hackathons and innovation days. I love this. You mentioned bringing in your customers into those innovation days and co innovating alongside them as well, with a big focus on helping your team understand new services that are coming to market, AI and Contact center and others. Anything else you'd like to leave us with as we wrap it up?

Nancie Calder [00:36:16]:

Yeah, just the pace at which Microsoft is bringing out innovations is, I think, a challenge for us all. Anybody who's feeling that, it's a lot and it's like a fire hose. I share your feelings because it's ever changing and yeah, so kudos to everybody who's keeping up.

Neil Benson [00:36:34]:

Nancy, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Nancie Calder [00:36:36]:

Thanks for having me.

Neil Benson [00:36:39]:

Thanks, Nancy, for joining me on Practice Leading. If you want to connect with Nancy, links to her LinkedIn profile are in the episode description. If you want to search for Nancy's name it's N A N C I E Nancy, Here are my three key takeaways from my conversation. Number 1 Innovation at Scale Instilling innovation isn't just about technology, it's about having the right mindset. Nancy emphasized hiring for passion and curiosity, enabling teams to embrace change and leverage new tools like AI, both for customer solutions that you're building as well as personal productivity. Secondly, continuous learning is a non negotiable. Nancy's team is supported with dedicated learning hours, a gamified certification initiative, peer led communities and mentorship both within and beyond Avanad, and a growth mindset that ensures future proofed teams. Thirdly, global collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Neil Benson [00:37:33]:

Whether it's bimonthly meetings across regions, practical project debriefs using Copilot or dynamic communities of practice, fostering those connections across borders and time zones is key to success for truly global practice. Not something that's affecting superware just yet, but might be relevant for your business. If you're operating internationally, you can grab detailed show notes with all the key takeaways from every episode, including this one by joining the Practice Leading lab. Visit practiceleading.com, enter your first name and email on the homepage or click on the link in the episode description and you'll receive a link to the free tier of the Practice Leading Lab, which is just for podcast subscribers, where you'll find a download for every episode. Until then, keep experimenting. I hope you enjoyed this Practice Leading episode and found it just as inspiring as I did. If you did, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. Reviews help other like minded practice leaders like you find this podcast and grow our community.

Neil Benson [00:38:34]:

I'd rather have a four star rating with a suggestion for one thing that I can improve than a five star rating. But you know, five star ratings are pretty cool too. Until next time, keep experimenting.