Power Platform IT budget | A paradigm shift needed to be compliant with SaaS? (4/4)

The previous 3 episodes set up the scene we´re into today, in episode I, the intention was to highlight current ongoing discussions with IT departments around their readiness on a new norm created by the growing number of developers which are also known for as „citizen developers“. In episode II, the focus was on various power platform features that can be licensed individually or in a mix + the intro of a first problem statement to setup an operating model designed to avoid unaccountable licensing spent. As a follow-up, in episode III, we added a second problem statement to highlight the balancing mix of emerging, current and legacy technology support and find a way that fits all requirements and offers enough room for growing or creating new business.

Today, let me introduce you to a recent game I came back to during pandemic times. The Tower of Hanoi. Does anyone know this from their childhood as well?

After a customer workshop, I was „brought back to reality“ (I guess many of you know the WFH challenge) – someone asking me around this game. What it is? How to play it? If there are rules to apply?
To my surprise, I was perfectly reminded of how to think about problem solving and discover a solution. Kind of a flash back, as a couple of weeks before, I was installing the Tower of Hanoi game based on Power Apps. For those not being familiar to this game a quick wrap up of rules to play this game:

a) A larger disk never can´t be positioned on top of a smaller disk

b) you do have 3 bases and the overall goal is to move the Tower from the source base to a target base you define first. You´re only allowed to move one disk at a time.

You might now be puzzled on how this can be related to the previous 3 episodes and our 2 problem statements. Let me help you understanding the bigger picture here.

First, the disks can be seen as the several modules (products) that can be found in a SaaS offering, like Power Platform. Orange for instance being the Office 365 or newly Microsoft 365 seeded services, purple being Power Apps, blue being Power Automate, I think you get it now…
The bases being the individual departments reporting their individual demand; the rules highlighting the difficulty (problem statements) and why in some situation (moves) it will fail.

Still puzzled? Need an example? No worries, let´s play this virtually…

Obviously the first move in this game is a simple one. Let´s say a department comes up with a need for using Power Virtual Agents, which is what the green disk should be for. As a reminder, my basements are seen as departments. From a pool of licenses (let´s say my license catalog), I could serve this department demand, pricing and activating this service. And for the sake of simplicity, let´s say the budget for this was pre-planned.

We continue to play this game with a 2nd department, raising demand for AI Builder capabilities, which the red disk is for. As budget again was pre-planned, this service could be offered, maintained, operated and also supported by IT.

Everything works fine, until we hit the day X within our budget year. Our first department returns to us with an additional demand. They figured out that with the help of Power Automate, they could refine their Power Virtual Agents service and automate some tasks, but as the department played with this in a trial, several users in this department discovered that there´s demand for automation outside of Power Virtual Agents as well. Think of it as why the blue disc is now even bigger than the green disc. Unfortunately, we violated rule a) of the Tower of Hanoi game. Does this remind you of something?
In my case, yes. I feel reminded of my customer talks and them struggling with exactly this situation happening during a financial budget year. The department wasn´t able to address their demand beforehand and now struggles to have budget for the additional requirements. The question would be, what would change, if instead of the bases seen as department, IT would start to think of „in categories“. So each base becomes a summary of categories?
And just to outline: Categories are org-wide, can be assigned to multiple departments and new requirements can kick-off new categories. Let´s turn back to the Tower of Hanoi.

Interesting enough, all of sudden there´s a new path to comply rules for our next move. The Power Virtual Agents and AI Builder „stack“ unites into a category and we do win a new category, free for another move. This additional move allows us to add our incoming request by our department which is around the Power Automate service. This „service category“ could be extended by additional services as well as used by additional departments. Same as we can continue to play the Tower of Hanoi with additional moves by shifting & extending categories, I do feel reminded of a typical Power Platform digital transformation story.
No customer starts with a „big bang“. Everyone starts small, growth over the time, raises new businesses and gets more and more familiar with all the capabilities and benefits of the Power Platform as a digital transformation platform for their company.

Does it mean, we all should now start playing Tower of Hanoi in our IT meetings? Of course not! My only intention was you to pause, think and come up with a solution. Same as you would do it when playing the game.

Am I saying that this is the overall solution to our problem statement in total? Certainly not, but isn´t it interesting to see some similarities between a game with simple rules and a current business problem? Maybe a paradigm shift is what is needed to stay aPaaS, SaaS, IaaS compliant and the way those services are offered or licensed.

There´s a solution to everything. Hopefully, you do feel engaged now to discuss Power Platform licensing and always feel reminded to keep out-of-box thinking. And remember, pause, think and re-start to find your solution.

Until next time, keep safe and healthy.