Meet our People: Ville Heikkinen, Power Platform Advisor
I got into the IT field through my engineering studies in Savonia University of Applied Sciences. During my studies and after graduation I worked as a Service Desk specialist supporting customers with their IT related questions and problems. Even though the work itself wasn’t related to Power Platform the knowledge and experience I gained played a significant role in my journey to join FF.
Before joining FF, I had worked about three years as a Power Platform consultant delivering projects and training. FF was looking for someone to fill a very specific role where 50 % of the time would be spent on consulting related activities and the other 50 % working with our ITSM system managing and resolving customer incidents and requests. I decided to join in September 2023 as a Power Platform Advisor.
What surprised me the most when I joined was not the level of expertise present in the company, which was well known, but the focus on employee wellbeing and the culture where it is okay to indicate if some project or task does not align with my interests. This took a while to get used to but I still appreciate it to this day. People usually enjoy working more when they get to participate in tasks, processes and technologies they are interested in.
Organizational changes moved me first to 100 % consultancy delivering customer implementations and then later taking a Team Lead role for one of our Power Platform teams. Being a Team Lead was a fantastic opportunity for me. As someone who was very technically minded and process oriented, to learn more about the importance of soft skills. I have been learning not just from day-to-day human-to-human interactions but also from literature as our internal book club read “The Trusted Advisor” by Havid H. Maister, Robert Galford and Charles Green, which was eye opening and left me with a huge backlog of new books to go through. This spring I “re-joined” our Continuous Services team to share my knowledge and experience, support the team and develop our tools and processes.
My day at FF
As you can imagine, usually no two days are the same. However my aim is to group similar tasks or topics into the same day each week, to avoid context switching as much as possible. Am I always successful? Of course not, but the goal is there. The same thinking applies to Teams notifications, which I keep turned off on my desktop. I will check new messages periodically, but I try not to check every message as soon as they arrive. If someone calls me via phone, I know it’s time to drop everything else, until then I try to be the master of my own schedule!
Usually my day starts by checking messages from Teams and Outlook and reminding myself what is on the agenda that day. Most of the time my calendar is my to-do list. If I need to achieve something that day, I will create a calendar event to remind myself and indicate to others that I have reserved that time to work on something and I might not be available.
A key part of my role is ensuring that our team has the knowledge, tools, and support needed to deliver high-quality services to our customers. I particularly enjoy working closely with colleagues to solve challenges, share expertise, and help each other succeed. By combining our strengths and experiences, we can provide better outcomes for our customers and continuously improve the way we work. Once priorities for the day are clear, I focus on customer engagements, supporting ongoing initiatives and helping customers achieve their objectives.
I work mostly with Power Platform tools with some Azure resources and Fabric in the mix. My specialty and what I’m mostly interested in is automation, no matter the tool needed for the use case. There is just something satisfying about working with data and building automations and integrations that genuinely improve business processes. Another area I really enjoy working with is platform maintenance, governance, and development practices that enable the efficient and safe use of Power Platform technologies. With Copilot, there is now huge interest from citizen developers in creating their own agents and it is rewarding to help enable that.
Focus on wellbeing
One of my focuses during the workday is making sure I take enough breaks. I have a bad habit of getting too deep into concentration mode that I forget to rest my eyes and brain for hours at a time. If there is a 1-on-1 or a similar meeting, where me sitting at my laptop is not necessary, I try to go for a walk outside and have the meeting there.
I have experienced that this short break makes a huge difference and increases energy levels for the rest of the day. Again, is this something that I succeed in doing every day? Unfortunately not. It is surprisingly hard to build and maintain routines that help preserve energy, but I have a good idea of what works for me. I don’t think you’re ever done building these habits, and they continue to evolve over time. It’s something I would recommend everyone to think about.
