Ready to grow and go Forward
The First 100 days of FF
It’s been now 100 days since we started our company Forward Forever. As many of our clients and partners have commented, we had quite the timing for the launch. We barely managed to set up our physical premises to Kamppi, Helsinki – carry all the electric tables weighing a ton and other furniture to the office. And then, the world closed down. It’s been all online since then, and it’s been way better than we thought.
What we have achieved within these first 100 days is a lot. We are happy that our message has reached the audience, and companies have been contacting us to seek help, especially with Power Platform governance. A typical scenario in organizations right now seems to be that new apps, reports, and flows keep popping up here and there by the brave citizen developers. They want to get more done with the latest technologies. This phenomenon is precisely what we courage and try to make it possible. IT departments have also noticed this, and want to make sense of the environments and make sure that all is in place as low-code tools are not going anywhere.
We have seen that governance is a bit scary word and often thought just as strict policies. Instead of governance, we should start speaking more about Power Platform enablement. Ultimately it’s all about taking ownership of your digital tools by leveraging a low-code platform.
Setting our goals
As a company, the first 100 days has also included the process of turning our values and goals into measurable actions. Our mission is to represent industry-leading expertise and leverage this for meaningful applications. From the technical perspective, we are 100% focused on Microsoft Power Platform.
In order to follow our progress and to turn our goals into measurable milestones, we decided to use OKR model (Objectives and Key Results).
Our OKRs help us stay focused and are often gentle reminders to us what is important and what is not. We can already reveal one thing, building a company culture that thrives on passion to continuously learn more and share the knowledge, is certainly high on our OKR list.
Focus on good tools and knowledge sharing
It’s not just enablement consultancy we’ve been doing these months, we have worked with all the Power Platform modules with varying use cases. Moreover, we have also set up our business processes running on top of – yes, you guessed it – Power Platform. We aim to have our internal tools to be as smooth as possible so we can focus on the important stuff. It is not only ourselves to whom we build these tools; we are happy to share our solutions with our clients.
Being a valuable member of the Power Platform community is in our DNA and this is why we have wanted to be present in the relevant social channels since day 1. In addition to our team members speaking in several community events, we also managed to get our first FF webinar arranged to share our highlights from the Business Applications 2020 Release Wave 1. Making this webinar happen involved a lot of dogfooding with MS cloud tools like Forms, Power Automate, Teams Live Events and of course Dynamics 365. The way we see it, it’s crucial to practice what you preach and run your business on these same tools that our customers use, even if we are still a bit smaller team at this point.
Referring to our OKR goals, another of our internal development focus areas has been knowledge sharing. As anyone who works with Power Platform knows: keeping up with the latest changes, new features, and the MS ecosystem as a whole takes a lot of effort, and no one can do it alone anymore. We are tackling this challenge with Microsoft Teams. We have built our Teams to be our central channel for sharing and learning. We are happy to see Teams be an integral part of work today. Power Platform + Teams is our combo to go.
As we spend a lot of our time learning new and keeping up to date with the latest features, we aim to share the information digested to our clients. For this, we have launched our Power Platform support service named Fast Forward that runs on Teams. Our goal is to pick relevant content and deliver it tailored. Also, whenever you might have something in mind you’d like to hear our opinion, just drop us a message, and we’ll work it from there.
Our next steps
We are incredibly thankful to the people who have become our first customers. Our clientele today comes mainly from Finland, but we’ve been happy to land a couple of new customers also from abroad. Especially now, when the world is in the remote-first mode, this is the way we want to go.
Microsoft tech landscape is broad, and a single company cannot focus on it all. Therefore, we have also partnered with companies sharing the same values and attitude to get things done with the highest quality and competence – kudos to you too! Some names will be dropped in the near future so stay tuned.
Now, it is evident that Power Platform has momentum, and we as a company are eager to grow. We have decided that now is the right time to start hiring. We are now looking for existing or future stars to join our team. One thing is a must, you need to share the passion to learn new continuously. Please take a look at our posting and drop us a message if you would like to be a crucial part of our team and hop on our Power Platform ride.
Cheers,
Lasse