HR Vision Podcast #25 – Microsoft HR Tech from the inside ft. Adeel Edhi

Ivo:
Hey everyone, and welcome to the HR Vision podcast. I'm your host, Ivo, and every week I'm going to have a conversation that matters about HR.

This week I have with me Adeel Edhi, welcome Adeel. How are you?

Adeel:
Hi Ivo, I'm good. Thank you.

Ivo:
Good, thank you for being here. Adeel is a Senior Solution Architect at Microsoft. And despite being with the company for almost 12 months, he has an extensive experience with Microsoft Technology. He was kind enough to take some time off his busy schedule to come on the show to talk about the world of Dynamics 365 and now it helps empower the modern workforce. So let's get to it Adeel. Are you ready?

Adeel:
Yeah Ivo. It's my pleasure and thank you for having me in your famous podcast.

Ivo:
Thank you so much. Alright, let's start with a little bit of context. Let people know who you are, give us a little introduction about you and your professional background.

Adeel:
Sure. So hi everyone, my name is Adeel Edhi. As Ivo already mentioned and I've been in this field of business applications consultancy for around 15 years now. Mostly focussed on the EMEA region. I've been traveling to different countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Currently based out of a small town in the southern part of Germany. And my journey has been slightly different to the usual textbook consultant.

I've been actually one of the lucky ones. You can say where I got a chance to work on multiple applications, not just Microsoft in this time frame. I worked on Oracle, and SAP - Business One to be exact. And then obviously coming to as we know Dynamics AX and then now 365, but also carrying out different roles in the organization. So been involved in this 15 years doing selling pre-selling. Driving customer strategies, implementing supporting the customers, but also taking some roles like hitting the practice, building a practice for an organization. Mostly the experience has been at the partner side. Yes, I joined Microsoft recently and I'll talk a bit about it later.

But before that I was also involved in roles like managing the PNL's driving the region. So a various range of experience you can say that I gathered in this time and how I collected a lot of feedback and aspects, you know. But mostly from the partner side and now coming to the Microsoft side. I recently joined. I'm part of the fast-track team as a senior solution architect. And the main reason I joined was basically to amplify what I'm doing, right?

So the impact I have over the community, being able to do something which I can share with maybe, not 5-10,but hundreds of customers and I truly believe in the vision Microsoft has. I've stayed with them for about 12 years now. So a very low number of years with other applications. When I looked into Microsoft. And yes you always had a lot of gaps, a lot of issues, a lot of lacking compared to the other ERP's, at least back in 10 years ago. But I've been impressed and been aligned with their approach. And so it made sense for me to kind of now join them and work together with them.

Ivo:
Interesting. That there is a lot of experience with this with these types of technology. But going a bit, even maybe back a bit more back, it's when did consultancy came to your to your life; to your career? Was it something that you chose, you steered your career that way because you started to enjoy it from the first working experience - how how did that happen?

Adeel:
And without taking too much time because we would love to talk about future, right? Him academically actually not even from IT. I have a finance background. I'm a fellow member of ACCA, which is an accounting body in the UK.
So it makes you think "Hey, an account. How does he end up in consultancy?" and at least back when I joined, that was in 2006-7, when I actually came into this field. This was not a norm, right and well, I mean I did love numbers and I was doing auditing and counting. But I always had in my mind "Is that something that I'm going to do forever?". Just trying to put people accountable for what has been done already. And nothing in the future. Future looking. And being interacting with the people, because that's what I like.

One fine day there was this Oracle partner in Pakistan and that's where I come from, and they had this application; they were looking for new or recent graduates of accounting and looking to join this amazing field of ERP and obviously that made me join them. Then a couple of months down the line, I obviously ended up realizing that this something I really want to do.

I had to go against a lot of my colleagues and a lot of my friends and family. Telling me what are you doing, but it worked out fine for me and obviously having a business background comes in handy as well. Because you are able to connect with the business stakeholders and understand their point of view. And I think this was the gap that we filled back then. A decade ago, where this field needed some business fusion to it. That when you are actually coming into the implementation side, and the business users, the business stakeholders needs, CFOs and CHRs, they listen to someone who is from their background. They are more comfortable with it, and obviously it worked out, so yeah. Fascinating. Since then I've still been in this field. Never thought about going back.

Ivo:
Alright, that's fascinating because you know, your story is a lot similar to some consultants that we've interviewed before. Not all of them came from like the usual technology background or HR background. They just sort of happened. They enjoyed the fact that they could talk to people and work on implementing systems that help people in their daily lives so it's very similar in that way, so that's that's a cool story.

How much these days are you involved with the HR part of Dynamics?

Adeel:
Good question. You know, am I even credible enough to be in this call?

Ivo:
Of course, of course you are. I'm sure you are, otherwise you wouldn't be here!

Adeel:
Surely! So HR has been, I mean just a little bit of the background. In this role and then why HR has always been key to us, is that wherever whichever role I was in, and whichever company I was working with: HR, and as that because belonging to an HR implementation provider, you're not at this. This piece has been an opportunity for a lot of partners, right where we were always presented with an opportunity or a gap, and from Microsoft where you would go into a deal. They would step in there and the customer always had to say that OK, well there are better solutions out there. The competing ERP solutions or the HR solutions can do much more. And this why we took it as an opportunity, at least I did. And worked on different solutions.

Whether it be designing payroll solutions, or implementing or enhancing the HR capabilities. Or filling those small gaps here and there to improve that. And this has been my involvement. There have been days in the past where I've actually. Worked on designing payroll tax calculations, and also building employee portals, etc.. Productizing whatever we had. But when you look at it now, today even part of Microsoft and being in Microsoft I actually have chosen to be part of this as we call it 'product crew'. So we have these product crews, which is in addition to the normal faster engagements that we do with our customers.

Product crews, and this is part of the HR product crew as well: We are basically acting as a bridge between the product engineers who are busy with their R&D roadmaps. Building and launching new things and their customers, right. Bringing some sanity between these two. And as you know, we are going through a lot of these changes as well. So we try to kind of harmonize and synchronize between these two parties. We are listening to our customers. Taking their feedback and trying our best to ensure that the road map that we come up with is aligned to our customers.

There's something that we recently announced as well which is our customer Advisory Board. We will be doing it at the product level, so which means that we will be having our HR product Advisory Board. It is private at this point in time, limited to existing customers, but we'll be talking and onboarding or key customers and taking their feedback, aligning them to our roadmap; make sure that whatever we do is for them. So there's definitely, you know, that. I'm part of those those things as well, so I'm fully aligned. Fully involved.

Ivo:
Yeah, I think that idea of evolving customers. It makes a lot of sense. I think you can use a lot of the feedback to improve the tools, so that's great and I feel Microsoft has been, through the years, very connected to what the customer needs are. Trying to just develop everything in alignment or at least for other products. May be HR that's maybe not the case in the beginning. But I feel that now that's the case, and it is for other products from Microsoft. That's at least my experience.

Adeel:
Yes, certainly.

Ivo:
You've been at Microsoft for 12 months in the company, but you worked with the technology for 15 years. Like you said, like you said before, but what can you say about the evolution of the Microsoft products? Well, if you can talk a bit more about the evolution of the HR products from Microsoft. What did you see there? What can you say about that?

Adeel:
I think this is a very valid question. We have evolved our certain hard facts right? When you talk about very specific Dynamics 365 or HR offerings that we had, right? I think there are two things that we need to mention here that: First of all, there is definitely a focus Microsoft has on HR offerings or HR technology, but a lot of times we actually forget that it's not just the HR administration technology, right? It's also anything that has to do with the employee development, anything to do with their growth and the solutions for collaboration we have SharePoint and Teams. For communication and productivity we have products like Office and VIVA. And then obviously the end-to-end cycle covered under the new Dynamics 365 HR. So certainly they have evolved

We all know what has happened in the past, and how things have been, but there is definitely a focus for once. Why? Because the investment is continuous. It may seem as an outsider, OK, what are they doing? They're changing the directions every now and then, but isn't that a good thing? Because we're trying to adapt and we're trying to agile, right? It does come with a cost. It does come with a big cost to the customers moving back now again, they going outside. Having a stand alone HR and now coming back to the F&O infrastructure as well. Even those things are very costly, but there's definitely focus. There's definitely things coming into shape.

Because HR is so dispersed, it's so widespread, right? You can't just put it in one box. And the idea going forward would be to make sure there is more harmony, to make sure that all these products work in more in further synchronization. The teams that are focused on on, let's say, improving productivity, they they focus on that. But their investments are utilizing capitalized by the Dynamics team as well, and vice versa, and this would be, you would see how we move forward. And this one of the reasons why HR is being brought into the same platform. It is to capitalize on all the investments that have been done in the past, in the last three years on the F&O platform. We explore security, we explore maintenance management, back-end, everything right?

Once the dust has settled, you'll see a lot more of this harmony coming in and customers and partners realizing how it will be beautiful.

Ivo:
Yeah, I think I said this before in another episode is that it takes some courage as well, and it takes some some drive. And knowing exactly what you what you want, to say: "OK this not working as a separate tool. We need to harmonize that with the rest of the company. Insert HR back in connection with Finance and Operations. Because it makes more sense. It will make more sense for the customers". Although that might be costly and hassle for customers to come back. But it takes some strength of conviction and courage to take that decision I feel. So yeah, it goes a bit to the point that you that you were that you were making.

Now let's talk about the experience that you have with the product, with customers a little bit. In your view, what do you think is the impact of HR tech? You know, how can it impact the people growth and business success?

Adeel:
Yes, so I think in today's world this a no brainer anymore, right? So having an HR solution is in place is no secondary to your finance or sales or supply chain applications right? In fact, actually we have seen a lot of customers using HR as well as low hanging fruit to even introduce Dynamics into the mix. Where they are because yes, data-wise it's still challenge, HR data is not something simple. But process-wise it's still easier to migrate from your legacy applications.

We have seen that a lot of customers are actually stepping in and delivering HR before their Finance and Sales applications. So this is really happening. And now with everyone being remote and everyone in the whole new Gen being. Even us, right? I mean look at the new ones after us what will happen. But everyone is mobile enabled enabled, so I don't think there is a way out for any customer anymore to be able to attract and retain anyone right without being technology? So that's obviously one thing which is the need, right? There's no brainer, but beyond that as well.

I will talk about some examples where where VIVA was giving me an insight as to how I spend my day. I'm not sure if you got a chance to use that yet, but telling me if where I should be cutting down on my meetings and where I'm spending too much time. Even going to the level of details, yes, it's scary where what emails I'm reading via email and what sorry via phone and what responses I am actually able to, provide from, not from my phone. It actually tells me my habits. I'm able to adapt to it and I'm actually, changing myself as well right? How I schedule things, how I'm actually improving myself as well, so that's that obviously is where I'm growing as a person, but also this in the end. Helping me work as well, and the overall goals of the business.

Other thing would be that if I did not have, for example, I joined Microsoft and while this whole COVID thing happened then I have not met anyone in the organization yet physically, so I'm still remote. It's been almost 12 months and if I did not have access to, let's say, the organization data or the onboarding workflow was not automated as it should be. Imagine how left out I would feel compared to the other colleagues who would have joined before. So I think it's also becoming a fact that if organisations would not be as equivalent to providing everything, all the frameworks to remote people right? Or adjusting to this hybrid need, it would actually become active kind of discrimination or biases towards towards more physical employees having them on site which which I think won't work in the future.

Ivo:
Yeah I think it also supports a lot of the HR professionals make their jobs easier. Just to be able to get these tools to get people involved and they. It just makes everything simpler to them to get to people, to reach to new people even if they work, specially this time, working remotely.

Adeel:
When you talk about organizations, we are aiming for diversity, we are aiming for, a lot of things that has to do with people right? And a lot of C level executives will be, if they're not already, will be responsible in knowing their data about their people, right? And reporting on them, right? If they don't have that, if they don't have the systems they wouldn't know what is going on. and I think that will not work anymore, right? If they have to survive.

So I think product is important. Where you build something and you have a great product out there, but you really would need the right people to be able to sell it to be able to convince the user to use it.

Ivo:
Yeah, it's the old question. Like you can have a great product, but without people it's kind of pointless. Kind of hard to sell it.

Adeel:
Yeah, and I think HR will become a driving force and to bring in the new technology as well, right? Not just for their administration side of things, but to promote self-service. To push things more towards the employees where they are able to answer, get their questions answered in a more self service way. Where they are, they would push in for and this what I think will happen in the future as well if not already, where HR would push for more tools for collaboration, right? More tools for enhanced communication. And I think they will be. They will be working on those, not just relying on IT or the managers doing the job.

Ivo:
Yeah, I think that's a great great point of view, because indeed, I think HR solutions can really be the solutions that you can acquire in a company that is more connected to people. The other ones is just to simplify process, is to make it a bit more efficient, but it's not getting people together and getting people connected within the company and making them part of the of the organization. So I think that's a, yeah I never thought about that. It's a good perspective to have indeed.

Yeah, let's go over to the next and the next question I have for you. HR technology is referred to in a lot of circles as a niche market, but I would like to get an insight from you, working at Microsoft.
How important it is indeed, for Microsoft HR and how much effort that you guys putting into into HR tech compared to other tools? When you think about solutions for an organization. The first thing to think about is a Finance tool, or a CRM. Those types of things are supply chains that needs to be organized. We need a tool for that. But HR used to be used to be like hanging fruit just to use an expression that you used before. But nowadays, do you think HR tech is at the same level as the other tools?

Adeel:
If you see that I think the HR offering will be an overall platform, right? And this how Microsoft works and it will not be just Dynamics 364 HR, but you would have a lot of these things from the Microsoft landscape that you will that you will be getting and with the announcements the new things like metaverse being announced, they are all everything has to do with HR. So when you when you mention niche market we actually take something niche when you say that it's more industry focussed. So from our perspective, it's not really, we won't say it's niche, at certain our organization there is a point where even all the applications including finance, HR, they all are are headed by a single owner.

So there's definitely. It's not like a team which is on the side with no focus. That's definitely not the case. We obviously we made it sound like that, when we put it as a stand alone application. It was with the right intention, but I think we kind of unknowingly made it as you say a niche product. Where you don't see a lot of partners jumping in ,and we're really limited amount of partners. The ecosystem is limited, you don't see too many at least, efforts being made right, even in the community, right? And maybe when we bring this back to the F&O platform, we will be correcting that, right? So we will be ensuring that the ecosystem actually grows.

Now, in terms of the knowledge and skill set internally, we would be able to re-utilize all the resources that we have in the FnO, on HR as well, so it makes it really becomes much easier to deliver on the roadmap.

Secondly, from the community perspective, from the resources as well as the partners, you would see a lot more of them. Now talking about HR as well. And this what we tend to do, to bring HR to the mainstream. This as important as anything else for us, and I think you know. And this one of the things that we definitely do aim to do. Post this March. So for us internally this is something which is of high importance for sure.

Ivo:
Right, and you've been seeing a lot of. Have you seen the change? in the last 10 to 15 years, have you seen the change? Like a lot of more more and more customers wanting those those HR solutions, even if separated or integrated in another tool, but you've seen that from from customers? Like asking for HR solutions, wanting something more than than the Excel sheets, and those those types of things?

Adeel:
100%, because,I mean, it used to be secondary, right? It used to be like I mentioned, something that they would look into as "OK, fine, let us focus on our finance and applications, our core ERP. And then we'll think about the HR solutions later." But now as you mentioned, as we discussed a little earlier on, how it has become a need, right? Customers actually know this. They know it, they realize it. They know it's a challenge. So they have to get everyone to use it. So adoption usage is as as difficult as as anything you you need to obviously bring a lot of people on the on the same page, and it can be a wide variety of standardizing it. Sowhen things are manual and processes are manual HR, not just the users, the employees, but also HR admins, they find it easier, right? They could go in and make changes to the Excel. They know how easy it is to make exceptions.

But this eventually will die down, and we will see that the they will be. They will be going towards more standardization than it is right. And there is no doubt that everyone customers are definitely asking for more. In fact, they actually expect Microsoft to do a lot more.

Ivo:
They're getting demanding. Yeah, definitely we feel that way too. Let's move on. You mentioned a couple of times already: The partners. I'm very interested to know, what? What is your view on the partner community? Because It's a big part of Microsoft strategy to allow partners to come in, filling the gaps or extend functionality and help you guys; hel ourselves as well, as partners is creating something and to the customer it aligns with their needs. So yeah I would like to know: What is your involvement with with the partner community and how much do you think, it adds to the whole Microsoft experience?

Adeel:
So we know this, I mean, you have been in this for some time as well as I've been there working on the partner side. So one of the reasons you see more and more partners joining Microsoft and creating practices is because Microsoft its strategy is to support them. So Microsoft has always been a product company providing more of a platform, not focused on providing each and every individual need, but rather a platform and then making the community able to provide customer solutions. And that's where partners play a big role. Be it the licensing, implementing, be it coming up with the IT solutions like yours. To fill those gaps, and we don't even take them as gap right? I know I keep on saying that because I still have that partner mindset, our the community mindset. Those are gaps, but those are not really gaps, those are the solutions that partners provide and partners actually play a big role.

I will give you another reason why is because the whole fast-tracking that we do with our customers. The fast track engagement is for the customers, but it doesn't exist if you don't have a partner. So fast-track is also partner-exclusive. You know that our policies when it comes to licensing, they are partner-inclusive. So everything that we do is there. However, this also one of the weak links. If you read the latest Gartner report, this where we have very high aspirations and expectations from partner community, right, and obviously it becomes it is difficult with this Evergreen applications with so many versions coming in, trying to keep up with all the new things.

But definitely, we expect the partners to obviously come up with better industry solutions with more customization. Improving on their project management or delivery management practices. But certainly this is, we, I don't think there is, at least I'm not aware of that. But we are trying to go in direct and partners will not be in our strategy. I think this the reason why Microsoft has actually landed in the top tier ERP products or other products. Is by having this ecosystem strong and stable. And this because of the pattern community. And we wouldn't be able to scale it, right. There was no way that Microsoft would ever scaled it without that partner community. So 100% we recognize that as well as this the reason that Microsoft is thriving and surviving.

Ivo:
Yeah, definitely. We're very happy to be partners as well. Just as a small question or well, a last question, let's say. Let's look a bit into into the future. What you've been seeing within Microsoft, within the HR product. So yeah, just wanted to get to get your view on like HR trends, HR technology trends that you can see coming that will be really meaningful.

Adeel:
Besides going to the moon, right?

Ivo:
Yeah, do you see, Microsoft is also going?

Adeel:
At least not that I know at this point in time, but you know. And having your digital points in the metaverse... I think there will be a lot of new problems for HR to solve. We briefly discussed about, how HR is becoming the driving force with all the changes coming in. The hybrid work models and Metaverse, although it seems very far in the future, it might be too near for us to realize that this will have a big impact on how we think that our HR systems need to evolve and also from the customer side, HR needs to be ready for all these things coming in right and. I think in the near future, obviously AI is going to play a bit more role, whether it's recruitment. We know it's not easy. We still think that it can be negative in terms of discrimination and systematic bias that it can create, but there is obviously a long way to go with AI. Taking away those rudimentary and rhetoric tasks from the HR admins, and giving them the ability to focus on the real problems in HR.

So I guess that is where AI will play a big role in the near future. Yeah, obviously from from Microsoft perspective we still have a lot of things to fix and to stabilize in our foundation so that's what we look forward to. Once we have that, there is a lot more coming up in the future.

Ivo:
Definitely. It's a constant evolution, right? That I think is the approach that Microsoft has been doing and very quick. Also on those on those changes. It's not like a super stagnant product, or it gets reviewed every week almost. You guys are always getting more and more things done, so that's some that's great indeed.

I think automation, I would agree with you. You can already see like on the on Teams, for example the HR, Human Resources app that you can put on Teams like the chatbot, you can schedule vacations using that and those kind of things. I think more and more that is gonna it's gonna come up away just to make their life easier of people using the tools.

Adeel:
Yeah, I think these are very basic things. They, I wouldn't say that they are there trends. But yeah, we already know that we have solutions to these things. It's just that you will see a lot of this will become a norm right where where plug and play solutions would just be there. Whether it's based on Power Platform or any other solutions or technologies. Where HR would now just expect when they are onboarding any application, they would expect a few things to order to deliver. And automation and data intelligence would be part of those things, right? Going beyond just employee data maintenance, right.

Ivo:
Sure, absolutely. Alright. Well, that's basically all I had for you. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you enjoyed it.

Adeel:
Yeah, it was nice talking to you Ivo.

Ivo:
OK cool alright. Adeel, thank you so much once again. People listening in we'll see you next time on the next episode.

Adeel:
You're welcome. Bye bye!