SPOILER ALERT- Super nerd, accidental admin, constant put my foot in my mouth girl that I am is not PERFECT. Shocker I know– but there it is; I am on a flight home from Phoenix; floating on my post CRMUG Summit high, and I realized I needed to confess this “secret.” If you attended my panel session yesterday about mobility you know this; blondes, old salespeople (insert laugh while I remove my foot here)need I say more….My blog is a place where I want to share all of my excitement with you, but also I want to share the ugly, frustrating and challenging aspects of being an administrator as well. So before I share my post Summit glow with you I am digging in to the struggles of being an accidental admin or at least one of them. I want to be real above all, so here is something that makes me want to scream.
I recently updated my implementation from 8.2 to 9.0 and waitfor it….YES, IT WAS A DISASTER! I want to share my experience and then touch on best practices so that you won’thave the same experience. I want to also preface this by saying I have completed successfully, without this level of difficulty,updates including 2011 to 2013; 2013 to 2015; 2015 to online. This was a fluke but more than that it was bad planning on my part.
So let’s get started! To prepare, I read the notes on the upgradeso I knew what to expect to an extent. I sent out emails updating my users on the new features and changes to expect. I checked with my partner to determine if the upgrade would break any features in our new customized entities. We went live….and everything broke (okay not everything, but everything I needed to work well did.)
We have custom entities within D365 (who doesn’t) but my sales team is dependent on the entities and, by extension, the custom workflows that are associated with them. During our GO Live process all of the workflows broke which, in turn, almost broke my company, or so it felt like at the time. Our process is unique in that we submit bids to get a quote through our bids entity. When the product items are added to a bid, the salesperson can check a box which triggers a workflow to send the bid request form (pre-populated) with all items needing to be quoted on it via email to my project support team. What we found was that the workflow stopped sending and while the sales reps thought the requests had gone through they had not. This led to missing bidding deadlines, which resulted in lost revenue. THIS IS A DEAL BREAKER in a business. We eventually fixed the issue and got the missed items up to speed, but not only did we lose revenue, we also put our project support team in a position to be extremely behind and to waste time on bids we could no longer submit; and more than that it put my users in a position to distrust D365; leading them to follow each bid request with an email resulting in additional work for the project support team.You can imagine the cycle this creates.
We also have a workflow in place that takes a won quote line and creates a project order. During the upgrade, there was some sort of disconnect that wouldn’t allow the sales reps to add quote lines to a bid without a contract number. A contract number shouldn’t be required unless the line is won. Hard to win a line that hasn’t been bid yet right? The fix by my partner was to add a workflow to add a “TBD” in the contract field. The result? A TON of new project orders that we haven’t bid, much less won. It was a disaster. Once this was resolved, we moved on to the next disconnect, and the next, and yes there were more. . . . And so on and so forth . . . .
As you can imagine for me as an administrator, it’s highly frustrating to see something that is the very essence of your company (and job) fail so dramatically. Could this have been avoided? YES and no. Not upgrading wasn’t a long–termsolution, butwe should have tested the upgrade in our sandbox. Did I know this? Yes. Did I do it? No. Why you ask? Because we were out of space, and I had deleted the sandbox to give us that much more space to function. It would have been WAY less expensive to the company, and to my sanity, to pay for additional storage and test this than it would have been to lose those jobs.
I believe that training my users is more than just giving them a heads up on what is coming in an upgrade. It’s providing them documentation, videos, a visual key to new features, how to use them, best practices, tips, and tricks, etc. Good training is accessible to users at all times. We utilize the document library in D365, but we also use SharePoint. A good trainer also plans for the changes that affect the mobile device; if the sales team is using the app; they treat it like a new implementation. In this instance, that documentation and training came out after the update hit which didn’t help them initially; I am firmly recommitted to having my documentation and training in place before deploying an update as I’ve always done before.
I say all of this to emphasize: don’t get complacent in your position as an administrator. Plan your upgrades; patchesincluded out in advance; test them in the sandbox; and more than that, test the processes from start to finish. If you are too busy to do these things, as I am, then I suggest you offload some of your other tasks to co-workers or your team to make the time.I know it’s hard to do; spend one day with me, and you will see I am preaching to myself first. That being said, YOU as an admin are more valuable to your company in your role as admin than you are as a marketing blackhole, technologist, girl Friday (insert whatever extra roles you carry here). Your users depend on you to guide them and lead them through the changes that come down from Microsoft. I am a firm believer that D365 can make or break a business, and that starts with you and me my fellow admins. Don’t let someone else tell you it’s okay to upgrade; no one knows your system as well as you do so OWN it – push the upgrade if you have to, but OWN it. Utilize Power Users if you can; by creating a select group of “Super users,” you will get help testing the system and it will generate excitement about the newest features. Additionally, you will have support for those issues that do arise.
V9.0 is a really phenomenal version in my opinion; the features and usability make it a tool that my users want to use daily.Version 9.0 is more functional than previous iterations, and the bugs in the mobile app have decreased, at least for my team. To top it off, the UI (unified interface) makes it more recognizable across all devices. I am glad we upgraded! I know a lot of you are holding back pushing that update as long as you can, but don’t – it’s really a step forward.
I am so rejuvenated in my commitment as an administrator and in my desire to make D365 a superpower following my CRMUG Summit experience this week in Phoenix (more about that to come in another post). Please remember I am here to help you whether you are a new administrator struggling to find a foothold in this new path or a seasoned veteran who just needed a reminder that it’s okay to be passionate about what we do; we nerds must stick together after all.
The Accidental Administrator for Dynamics365 