Mercury XRM with Chris Kendrick

Welcome to the Scrum Dynamics podcast.

Congratulations to Simon Johnson and Ankit Sondhi from Illuminance Solutions in Perth, Australia. They are two the Customery Academy students who recently completed my Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps course recently and to Ankit for achieving his Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master I certification.

If you'd like to find out how to adopt an agile approach for your business application, and achieve your PSM certification from Scrum.org, you can get started for free with my Agile Foundations course at customery.com/foundations.

This is going to be the last episode of the Scrum Dynamics podcast. The show has expanded and is bigger than just Scrum. I’ve had guests on sharing the secrets behind their successful applications and it's more than just their implementation approach. And it's more than just Dynamics. I’ve had guests on sharing their Power Platform stories too, just like the guest in this episode, Chris from Mercury XRM.

So we’re launching a new show. It’s got a new name and a new website. A new theme tune has been specially commissioned. And we’ve got twelve amazing guests to help launch it. So there's never been a better time to subscribe to the show so that you don't miss a thing. If the DNS gods are smiling, your subscription will seamlessly switch over as soon as I publish the new show.

Mercury XRM with Chris Kendrick

Chris Kendrick is the founder and CEO of MercuryXRM, who develop recruitment software on Dynamics 365 Sales, and were a finalist in the Power Apps category at the 2019 Microsoft Partner of the Year awards. We discuss parsing resumes (and fine-tuning your own resume), as well as entity model designs, ISV product development, implementation approaches, remote training and user adoption incentives.

• Entity model design for handling candidate and client contacts. Different entities or a single entity depending on type of person?

• Integrating with LinkedIn and accessing their API.

• Parsing resumes and enabling sophisticated text search in model Power Apps.

• What phrases Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement professionals should include in your CV.

• MercuryXRM’s Microsoft Partner of the Year finalist award for Power Apps for an implementation at Red SAP Solutions.

• In PotY awards, solutions that involve multiple products (Power Apps, Dynamics 365, Power Automate, Power BI, SharePoint and Azure) are highly rated by Microsoft.

• Scaling your ISV product and upgrading multiple customers simultaneously.

• WalkMe, Whatfix and ClickLearn are emerging as viable alternatives to Dynamics 365 learning paths and custom help panes features.

• Using Kingswaysoft for data migration, which is a huge part of every MercuryXRM project.

• The importance of focusing on the client’s primary business outcome to guide your project.

• Rewarding the best users with input into the application backlog and roadmap.

• MercuryXRM has their own implementation approach and uses an online project management tool to bring transparency to the project.

• Prior to coronavirus restrictions, MercuryXRM was already making use of remote working tools, so the recent adaptations have been working well.

• Challenges remain with remote go-lives. Chris recommends training users two weeks beforehand, and then evaluating their learning with some gamified techniques.

• One client rewarded top users with prize-filled balloons.

• Leaderboards of the best users and providing voucher incentives also works.

• Improvements Microsoft could make to grow the ISV community lie around commercial topics rather than enhancements to AppSource.

• MercuryXRM handles timesheets, expenses and contractor documents; it integrates with Dynamics 365 Business Central or Dynamics 365 Finance.

• The impact of IR35 legislation in the UK on the freelance contract industry, and its postponement until 2021.

• We’re both missing in-person conferences, especially Microsoft Inspire, that bring Microsoft partners together.