A report from the first ever #PerthMVPDay

From left to right, Deepak Maheshwari, Sameera Perera, Peter Schmidt, Wyn Hopkins, David Musgrave and myself

Yesterday something unique happened. All Microsoft MVPs based in Perth brought their collective skills and stories together to run an event under the theme of “Innovating Workplace Productivity”.

The event was the first of its kind in Perth and it was very successful. There was a combination of deep smarts, compelling stories, a dash of serendipity and most interestingly, the event had a real harmonious flow to it, despite a) many of us being MVPs in different areas of the Microsoft ecosystem and b) many of us had never met until the day.

While I would love to take credit for the event, the reality is it was all conceived and organised by my wife, Terrie Culmsee, who had a vision for a different kind of event that brought together our diverse skills and experiences (see her vision in her own words here).

While it was a Saturday event, it was not like a SharePoint/Office365 Saturday. Rather than focus on one area of the technology stack, we deliberately covered the entire spectrum of the Microsoft ecosystem. We also did not divide the session up into streams (i.e. business vs tech geekery)

For the record, we had two Azure MVPs (Sameera Perera and Deepak Maheshwari), two Business Applications MVPs (myself and David Musgrave) and an Excel MVP (Wyn Hopkins).

There were a several things that stood out for me from the day

1. It really shone through that everyone was an experienced and engaging presenter. I think that stems from why we were awarded MVP in the first place — by contributing back to the community in various forms, it helps your personal development to not only be comfortable in front of a crowd, but learning to tell a good story and keep people engaged.
2. There were really, really deep smarts in the room. My goodness I learnt so much from David, Wyn, Sameera and Deepak. Their depth of expertise was obvious to all in the room and I sat there thinking to myself “I am getting so much out of this.”
3. Part of the reason I got so much out of the day was the fact we did not divide sessions among different streams, as it commonly done at conferences. This was Terrie’s doing — she took a user experience view and cleverly ordered the sessions in a manner that took participants on a rich journey of learning. I learnt some amazing PowerBI and Azure tricks along the way.
4. While each of us had a certain orienting focus to our talks (eg PowerApps, Teams, SharePoint, Flow, PowerBI and a myriad of Azure services), the level of coherence was uncanny. Peter Schmidt from Microsoft set the context for the day and presented a high level view of the Microsoft ecosystem. Then as each of us spoke, we not only touched on topics that were expanded on by the next presenter, by the end of the day we had covered everything Peter had spoken at a high-level when scene setting. This was not lost on the audience either. I had someone ask me how we managed to pull this off and my answer was “no dude I only just met half of these folks today!”.
5. We also got to learn the stories of the other MVPs and it was funny to see just how we lived parallel worlds. It seems all of us still have a love of lego from childhood. David Musgrave, Wyn Hopkins and I, in particular, all got into computers in the early eighties (while I was a C64 guy they were Sinclair Spectrum — but I forgave them). We moved into the world of Amigas, to PCs and never lost that sense of curiosity and exploration.
6. At the conclusion of the sessions, people stayed and we did a Q&A panel. This conversation drifted into topics of change management, delivery approaches and governance. I pointedly asked the audience whether they enjoyed this type of event and key theme that kept coming out was that finally, people got a sense of how the ecosystem fits together. In other words, they could see how the whole was so much more than the sum of the parts.

I have had some wonderful feedback on LinkedIn, and I think we all felt a combination of kinship with a dash of West Australian parochialism. Participants are really keen for us to do this again — and various ideas were mooted about the specific form and function. But the common theme was to continue to leverage the diversity of the MVPs who gave their time, expertise, stories and case studies.

Finally, if you want to run an event like this in your town I have a couple of recommendations:

1. Get a balance of MVP’s from across the ecosystem. Don’t just make it an Office365 event or an Azure event. Enough of pigeonholing events into technology stack silos
2. No streams. Each presenter has the full audience
3. No Contoso — airbrushed case studies ignore organisational reality. Use real world examples that people can relate to.
4. Speaking of relatable, start with a strong story and user-facing tools first. David told us his journey of becoming an MVP, what drives him then and now. We then started our technology journey with the power platform tools, and moved “down the stack” so to speak, into enabling services in Azure and the governance of all of this.
5. Get Terrie to help you sequence your talks :-)

I feel this is the start of a new type of community event in Perth (and beyond) and I am really looking forward to the next one.

Paul Culmsee

(proud husband and Western Australian Business Applications MVP)