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Driving Awareness and Creating Interest | European Power Platform Conference Recap

6 minute read
Driving Awareness and Creating Interest | European Power Platform Conference Recap

Driving awareness and creating interest within an organization are essential for the successful adoption of the Power Platform. Engaging strategies, such as "What's in it for me?" sessions, validate the change's importance and ensure understanding while generating enthusiasm.

Infographic of a funnel.

Not everyone has to be aware at the same time, and not everyone has to have the same level of interest, but we absolutely must pro-actively support both.

  • Answers “What’s in it for me?”
  • Validates the importance of the change
  • Ensures people understand what’s happening
  • Helps generate enthusiasm
  • Gets people on board with using the new technology
  • Tailored more easily than training to company and culture

Increase Power Platform adoption over time with ongoing awareness and interest building activity that creates engagement. The platform changes overtime as does your org.

  • Create a Viva Engage or Teams groups to continue the conversation on best practices and new features.
  • Share success stories about how people are using Power Platform in innovative and impactful ways.
  • Periodically host additional engagement events such as town hall meetings or lunch & learns to drive end user engagement.
  • Set challenges for people and run competitions to celebrate the best ways they’ve used Power Platform to do work differently.
  • Share tips and tricks (involving a broader communications contribution audience) that help others understand how they can get started (personal productivity tips are especially impactful here).
  • “Digital Internship” where employees within the business, spend 3-6 months within IT completing a digital internship.
Infographic visual with 4 suggestions.

Lunch and Learn

A great way to spread the word inside your organization is to run regular “lunch and learn” sessions. They’re an opportunity for individuals to come together to share what they have learned about creating apps and automating processes.

Sometimes people don’t want to or can’t set aside a full day to learn something they know very little about. Often it just takes igniting the spark for champions within the organization to rise-up and inspire others.

Hosting lunch and learns is also a great way to form and nurture a Power Platform community. It provides an environment for teams to share resources, guidelines, and procedures. Lunch & learns should be fun and occur regularly. As more people across the organization become interested, they will have a place to learn if this is something they want to get involved with and a path for them to start skilling up on Power Platform.

App Showcase

If you want to create a serious buzz in your organization and inspire more people to join your Power Platform community, an app showcase is where you do it.

Teams meet to demo what they have built, show problems that they have solved, and demonstrate the impact they have created on the organization by the apps they have made.

It’s an opportunity for teams and makers to come together with their creations and learn from each other.

Hackathon

A hackathon is a fun way to engage lots of people within your organization around a digital culture of change. The key objective is to develop sample apps and cultivate ideas to drive digital transformation.

Teams come together at the line of business or at the global scale, from different roles and departments, to compete and create apps that address an organizational need. Each team should be resourced with Power Platform and Office 365. The more variety of skills and roles represented, the better. One or more facilitators should be involved to organize the hackathon and define the teams and rules for the hackathon.

Successful hackathons often include the following: team names, prizes, food, music, laughter, and competition.

IT Internship

Some organizations that have truly embraced a digital culture have instituted what we would call “digital internships.” Employees within the business, whether that be in sales, facilities, HR or management, spend 3-6 months within IT completing a digital internship. This is a big commitment of time and learning on both sides, but it can have a fantastic impact.

The intern has detailed knowledge of the business, customers, or their department and function, and while in IT, they learn about digital transformation, Power Platform, and a Center of Excellence. IT and the intern, as a part of the Power Platform community, jointly collaborate on digitizing processes within the realm of the digital intern’s business.

This fosters greater understanding and collaboration between IT and the business and leads to innovative and creative problem solving.

Envisioning Workshops

Have you heard from colleagues who have attended a MicrosoftPower Platform training event and now want to use Power Apps to solve a business problem but don’t know where to start?

Do they have an idea in mind, but perhaps haven't fully thought through all the details and information they need to create an app?

The articles in Planninga Power Apps project can teach you how to convert an idea into a fully working solution by using Power Apps.

Use the materials to organize solution envisioning workshops with makers and help them plan and execute their Power Apps projects. This could be a great add-on to an App in a Day event that you are running internally.

Infographic visual showcasing training flow among different groups in an organization.

Tailored activities include Viva Engage or Teams groups for sharing best practices, success stories to showcase innovative uses, engagement events, competitions to celebrate creative solutions, and sharing tips for getting started.   Initiatives like "lunch and learn" sessions, app showcases, and hackathons provide platforms for community building and idea exchange. Digital internships and envisioning workshops further support this by deepening collaboration between IT and business departments and aiding in planning and execution of Power Apps projects. These approaches help to create a digital culture of change, fostering a community that appreciates and utilizes the Power Platform's capabilities.

Learn how Viva Engage Can Benefit Your Business!
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