Directions EMEA 2022: Reflections on Directions!

Reflections on Directions

This November I had the pleasure of participating in Directions EMEA 2022 in Hamburg. As a newbie not only to the company but to the industry itself I was very grateful to be offered one of these spots and make my way to Hamburg alongside my fellow support colleague Neelesh Singh and our general manager Valerie Clarke.

This partner conference was a fantastic opportunity to take a look of how Dynamics are envisioning the future for the product with the majority of improvements being highlighted in keynote sessions : The breach to the cloud offering, price reduction for add on environments and the Teams and Business Central integration as well as giving users with no Business Central licence the ability to read data in Teams will definitely will be appreciated by our end users and I’m sure my colleagues will or have discussed this in greater lengths in their blog entries.

Modern Service Solution

As a Junior Support Consultant, I wanted to see if there is anything I could bring back to our support team. Personally, I found the session by Agne Balkeviciute Lajiene called: ‘’Anatomy of the Managed Service’’ – very insightful. The presentation emphasised the importance of proactive support and how a business should strive to provide a service solution that would constantly monitor the processes of each customer, aiming to prevent workflow disruption for the end user by fixing the issue before it needs to be reported.

This can be achieved with the help of tools like telemetry which would allow the support provider to monitor key system metrics and would give us updates where and when something is down, there were other creative ideas as providing provisional health checks to ensure the system is always operating at the highest level and many more.

I believe that as a company we are always trying to optimise our performance both for the end user and our internal support consultants and embrace change. A good example would be our move to a new support platform called ‘’Fresh’’ – this allowed us to take off many recurring administrative tasks for employees, leaving us more time to deal with queries of customers, so I have no doubt that we will find a way to adapt these monitoring solutions in a way suitable for 4PS and make our support team even more efficient.

Young in Dynamics

The conference celebrated the new innovations and success of the product but brought light to concerns it is facing with the most notable being – talent shortage. The great resignation of Millennials and Gen Z has undoubtedly been a global issue within many industries with Dynamics being no exception.

The demographic analysis of partners showed that the industry average for an employee is over 45 years – showing that the industry has matured and has a lot of knowledge to share. However, the difficulty to hire or retain young professionals was highlighted amongst the top business concerns in the UK’s partner meeting and noted as an issue in many different sessions. It was highlighted that pay, negative contributions to mental health and burnout are common reasons for leaving over the last few years and good work/life balance, learning and development opportunities and high salary or financial benefits were amongst the key priorities for Millennials and Generation Z.

Making light of this information and with the hope to find solutions an initiative to hear the voices of younger community members was started by the organizers: to start, there were discounted event tickets for a certain number of community members with the condition of them being under thirty- this is how me and my colleague Neelesh got to make our way to the event.

Additionally, there was a dedicated panel discussion called: “Young in Dynamics” that had an overwhelming number of participants who wanted to share their personal stories and experiences as well as employers and organizers that wanted to take part in the discussion.

One thing was unanimous – there is a lot of change that needs and can be implemented to create a satisfactory work culture for the newcomers and the talent within the industry and I believe that giving this demographic an opportunity and platform to speak is a very good start. One of the first decisions made by the group was the given name “Young in Dynamics” which many of us did not identify with and therefore the *The new name is pending*.

You know a session is good when it inspires airport brainstorming sessions and discussions long after it finished so you can say it left a big impression on us!

Women in Dynamics

Other memorable moments included the ‘’Women in Dynamics’’ sessions led by an inspiring group of industry leaders as the CEO of Bam Boom Cloud Vicky Critchley. Discussions included important topics like ‘’how to retain, motivate and empower the women in your business’’ and ‘’building and inclusive organizational culture’’ with presentations and insight from community speakers topped up with an audience Q&A’s and a panel discussion.

With financial times reporting that women hold fewer than 5% of CEO positions in US and Europe I believe it is very important to have these conversations to raise the industry standard. The women in dynamics group have had a significant impact on the community over the last year with stats showing an increase in female employees in Dynamics but they are not planning to stop there. Vicky highlighted that even though there seems to be a positive movement forward – numbers of females in leadership roles are still extremely slim which not only shows how the industry fails to appreciate women but gives a lack of female industry role models for young professionals coming in!

As well as the sessions a big highlight was the Women in Dynamics awards which celebrated the inspiring women we have within our community and let us be extremely proud of our own Valerie Clarke who was shortlisted for the Diversity and Inclusion award!

Conclusion

All in all, it was a fantastic experience that provided the overview of what is new in the industry as well as igniting an element of pride and inspiration for a newbie like me to see the values and vision it has for the community of Dynamics.

I had a lovely time spending time with our 4PS colleagues not to mention the party was a blast!

About Directions 4 Partners

Directions 4 Partners is the independent community for Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners from the ERP and CRM channels. It is organised for partners by partners. Directions EMEA is one of the highlights of the Microsoft Dynamics year and it’s the place where Microsoft present new releases and partners can connect, share knowledge, and grow together.

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