2024 - a retrospective for me

So, it's fair to say that I'm a little late with this as I wanted this to be an end of year review but, instead I'm going to be putting this together as a new year retrospective. The aim of this is to treat it like an agile sprint and to look back and the way after like to do this is to talk about what went well, what went badly, what I should do more of and what I should do less of. This is hopefully not just a self-congratulatory pat on the back and isn't a New Year's resolution but just taking a little bit of time to reflect and think what I'm doing and, by making it public, hopefully holding myself to account to it a little bit. Perhaps you will see things here that resonate with you or perhaps you'll just hold me to account on some of these but whatever happens, hopefully you enjoy it.

What went well

Well, the first thing and something I'm hugely proud of is the fact that I'm now a director at Avanade. This is something I've been targeting since I joined two years ago, and it's been something I've managed to achieve at a time where it's been harder to actually get. I'm really proud of the work I've put in to get this and I'm also truly thankful for those who really supported me along the way that I'm not going to call out again, but you know who you are. ?Along with this, I've also been appointed the joint MVP lead at Avanade for this year which is something I'm very passionate about - how we can keep that feeling of community within the company and encourage others to do the same. It's been fantastic to see the number of MVPs that have arisen from Avanade, and this isn't just about hiring existing ones. I know many people will see the number of MVPs at Avanade and think there's something strange going on but it's truly about getting that culture of sharing working well internally and to nurture the passion to help MVPs succeed at work too. From a work perspective, the other huge achievement has been getting Copilot Partner of the Year and being a big part in helping that happen with so so many others. To be the very first one of those awards and to see the work that has gone in to make that happen has really made a difference to me.

From a work and community perspective, it's really been about Copilot and, later on, more about agents as well the extensibility story that has evolved. Trying to keep up with the latest and helping others keep up has been a massive part of the year. If I'm honest, there's been a lot of that story that is purely trying to keep up with all the different ways that things can be done but this has really got to a point where it's now about helping people think about their strategy and how they keep up with that how they plan for it and how to make sure that they are ready and in a good place to take advantage, not just about implementation.

From a pure community perspective, I have been so proud of what Zoe and I have been able to achieve with Copilot Connection this year. We are closing in on 10k downloads and the most popular were our episodes on the Copilot roadmap and busting Copilot myths. We can also say that we are an award winning podcast so big thanks to all those who voted for us in the UK Community Awards for best podcast. We also ran the Month of Copilot with around 40 videos shared across the range of Copilot offerings. Then in November, we launched the Copilot Fireside Chat with empowering.cloud, bringing the best Copilot minds around to answer your questions on Copilot. It’s not recorded so these are frank conversations that help get people thinking and we have some amazing guests lined up with Dona Sarkar in Jan and more to be announced soon.

Events have been some of my highlights with the always epic ESPC (and my now favourite part of the year – the ESPC Ugly Sweater contest, congrats Dan Toft ) preceded by some great speaking slots at many events. The reason I love these events are the chance to connect with people and bounce around thoughts on the reality of a lot of the things I evangelise. The chance to chat through problems, hear others take on the latest tech and what people are actually doing is what makes these events special. I also feel that moment of being in my tribe and connected with a group of people with similar thoughts and views. There is something so comforting to be around others that love to share, love to geek out and, in many cases, love a good excuse to party too. As I’m now fully entrenched in middle age, realising what matters to me is key and so many of these people that I truly see as friends is so much part of that, along with my family.

The peak of this was in March when I had the chance to go to my first in-person MVP Summit and first visit to Redmond. I still get a tingle when I remember heading to the Microsoft sign outside building 92 for the first time, something I have seen in so so many other photos. Then walking into the first session and seeing legends like Loryan Strant , Susan Hanley and Darrell Webster in one place and sharing feedback but taking a pause to say hello to me – these people know who I am!!! Imposter syndrome is still strong. The magic of the week was everyone being together and thanking MS for the good, challenging them on the bad and pondering on the new. I was shattered by the end but such a happy, taco filled shattered!

The Summit also led to an amazing community of MVPs on WhatsApp that I’ve loved now being one of the admins for. These groups help continue some of that feeling of a tribe on throughout the times where we are not in person. A little more later on the bad of that though.

It has been amazing to not only have the in-person events but to join some digital only events that others run, and you can see a few of those linked at the end too. It is always an honour to be invited by others and hope that my chat’s inspire and at least vaguely entertain. I also loved the opportunity to write an article on Copilots for the European Collab Summit magazine and the feeling of seeing people reading my article around the Wiesbaden venue gave me such a buzz.

Finally, on the “what went well”, I am now part of a user group and it has been amazing to get things moving in connecting people. It’s not easy and has been more challenging than I expected but the reward of bringing people together to learn and share is so worth it.

What went badly

Time to get into the nitty gritty and the harder parts. Well, I actually find the self congratulatory parts hard to do to be honest, but I hope that I have managed to do that this year without being too smug on that front. However, this part is what I feel is important about the end of year, to be honest on what I didn’t do so well.

The first two are personal to me and linked together. My writing has really not been where it should be at all. I haven’t done any blog posts at all and, even worse, the two books I have been working on are massively overdue. Why? There’s not a simple answer but getting the time to sit and properly focus has been very very hard. I feel I always have too much on and sitting still on one thing for more than 45 mins makes me pause and think I should be doing something else. Prioritisation paralysis has been a big problem and while writing has flowed at certain points, this hasn’t been consistent enough.

Which brings me onto the next issue of consistency. As well as the writing, I have not always stuck to the consistency of getting Copilot Connection out, of finishing off open-source side projects, of delivering against too many over promises. I am always trying to get myself to do less and over deliver but the excitement of new tech (especially in this AI/Copilot/Agent powered era) and my inability to focus (yup, think I’m one of the many undiagnosed ADHD spicy folk) leads to half started things and not delivering enough.

Outside of me directly, one of the things I am sad at seeing is the demise of Viva services, in fact my two favourites! Viva Topics started the year with a deprecation announcement and now Viva Goals is following it for 2025. I do understand that Microsoft needs to be commercially sensible with these services so what I feel has gone badly is the collective ability of consultants, community and Microsoft to sell the value to organisations. Each of these require some planning and coordination to actually make them happen and that has often deterred people from making it happen. The focus on the value of employees feels like it has diminished across industries since the peak of Viva being announced around the pandemic and so it is sad to see this reflected in the lack of adoption of tools to improve knowledge sharing and align goals. I hope that this does not continue and I see the growth in skills alignment, effective comms and gathering insights will continue to grow and keep the Viva brand alive. However, it will only be there if we can help organisations understand the value that it can bring.

Regarding comms, it has been interesting to see the shifts in social media. Some of the magic of the tech community has been the strength of working out loud, allowing others to learn as they themselves learn. From the early days of Twitter, this allowed open conversations that anyone could join in. Over the last few years, though, there has been a shift to smaller groups and communities that are more closed, especially with WhatsApp and Teams. It is fantastic being part of these when you know that they are there but the discoverability of these and openness to others is more of a challenge. I sense it has become harder to get more involved in activities and be engaged. Initiatives like the M365 and power platform community and the shift to Bluesky has certainly helped open things up a little more but I hope this continues and we see the open work happening.

For me personally, it has been a challenging time in my personal life this year. Chronic illness in the family and challenging neurospiciness has kept me very much on my toes and balancing needs, wants and necessities on all fronts. It is not something that I speak about often as it is one of those things that just carries on. However, it makes the travel hard and adds to the distractions that impact the consistency. Will it change in 2025? Fingers crossed!

One of the saddest moments of the year was while waiting for my flight back from Stockholm for ESPC. There I heard the awful news that Markus Moeller had lost his battle with cancer. I had the chance to meet Markus at Collab Summit and it felt like he was battling hard. Throughout, he continued creating samples and sharing his knowledge with a huge contribution of samples through GitHub and the M365 community calls. He will be greatly missed and I am hoping that we can do something to remember him in 2025. For now, make sure you read the beautiful post he wrote in 2019 on why he became an MVP and the amazing contributions he has worked on.

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What should I do more of

There is a large element of continue what has gone well in 2024 and I certainly want to continue sharing where I can. Exams in the family will challenge the amount of travel I can do to events this year (being away puts a large strain on the family) so I will be tempering my in-person events?but I will still find ways to share. As part of this, my aim is to build up more writing and to find ways to use the periods where things flow well to then share when my inspiration has slowed.

Being remote, I still aim to bring another Month of Copilot and allow people to share the power of AI in the modern workplace. Allowing people to come together and take different angles to what is happening is what makes these online events special. This year, I hope that we can make more live events happen as well, to allow people to ask more questions.

Another great event that I have had the joy of being a part of was the New Speaker Workshop where Sara Fennah , Zoe Wilson and Luke Evans have helped pull together some amazing tips for people hoping to start out in public speaking. Through talking through writing a great speaker submission, what is needed to prepare, keeping confident and many more areas, we are hoping to make new generations of speakers and inspire others to do more. Hoping that we can get another workshop in this year.

An optimistic hope is that I can get more involved in hackathons this year. As MVPs were invited along to the annual Microsoft hackathon. Being part of this incredible event has definitely made me want to get involved in more hackathons this year. Where and how? Well, that’s still something for me to work out!

Finally, there are some incredible voices out there that I will be listening to closely. Abram Jackson has been really at the bleeding edge of understanding what is possible with the latest Generative AI and sharing his views and own experiments. With a day job of making the magic happen with agents, he is also keeping up with all that is happening in the wider arena. Alongside Abram, Ethan Mollick, the author of Cointelligence and “an associate professor at Wharton who studies the effects of artificial intelligence on work, entrepreneurship, and education” (according to his Wharton profile). As well as being a fantastic author, his work on sharing the latest use and analysis of AI models is hugely insightful. Both of these are people I will be closely following alongside the awesome work Fabian Williams, Jeremy Thake, Sebastian Levert and more at Microsoft are doing with Declarative and custom agents.

What should I do less of

All of these areas in this section are very much personal and for me. The first is a little ominous as I could already be breaking part of it with this list but over promising and under delivering is something I want to do less of. Being realistic about what time I have and setting those expectations. It is so easy to be swept up in the excitement of saying “yes” to so much, but it only leads to either disappointment for others or stress for me and those close to me. I also want to make sure that I keep more “me” time this year. I work a 9 day fortnight but have spent too many of those days taking on other things. I tried before to keep those as a day where I plan nothing and see where the mood takes me but as things have been busier, I have let that lapse. The pile of Lego that I had unbuilt at the end of 2024 says that I have not been taking enough pauses so let’s hope I can do a little less.

By doing a little less, I also hope to do less jumping between different ideas and getting things done done rather than flitting about a lot. It’s great having new ideas but I want to make sure that I balance this with actually delivering, especially where it concerns things that can help the community as well.

Summary

On reflection, there have been some great highs this year but balanced with challenges and areas that I feel I could have done better with. Balancing the excitement of what could happen with the reality of what needs to be done is modern life in a nutshell and is unlikely to change too far any time soon. Being aware of this and preparing for it will help make 2025 just as successful.

I look forward to these plans being ruined by even more exciting things to come. I look forward to people being central to the magic that happens. I look forward to being able to sit back and reflect again next year.

Related links and some places you can see my 2024 content:

M365 Community – building an Ignite custom agent Building a custom Copilot for the Microsoft Ignite conference presentations

Cambridge Power Platform User Group - https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/cambsppug_copilot-community-techevent-activity-7171546019229347840-uYgi?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Sprint Zero - Copilot Connection - Guest: Kevin McDonnell

Month of Copilot - Month of Copilot - YouTube

Copilot Learning Hub - Copilot Learning Hub | Microsoft Learn

MVPs favourite content MVP’s Favorite Content: M365 MVP Week #2 | Microsoft Community Hub

A conversation about Copilot with Peter Rising - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUp_GsxOfYM

Think Copilot with Waldek and Garry - Think Copilot with Kevin McDonnell