#MSDyn365BC partners need to address the skills gap to suceed

I don’t think I’m inherently confrontational but occasionally I read something, especially online, that I believe is just wrong, I'm compelled respond.  I remember having a huge ‘online discussion’ with my friend Mark Brummell a couple of years ago about the pro’s and con’s of extensions. Today its another luminary of the NAV world, Guus Krabbenborg whose article wound me up.

What’s he said that’s provoked me to such ire that I’ve taken to the keyboard? Well it’s an article where he says that the developer shortage shouldn’t be a problem and that we all need to learn to sell standard Dynamics product with no customisations.

Come on Guus, get up with the timeline. Sure don't customise for the sake of it but with a complete ban your talking last half decade my friend. I know ‘stay standard’ was the corporate line for all of us until a couple of years ago but that was only to counter the fact that upgrading in the NAV world was an absolute pain and it was better to persuade the client not to demand what they wanted because of the consequence it would cause them for evermore in the C/AL development world.

That’s not the case now with AL based extensions. In minutes if not seconds, I can package the changes, be they simple personalisation or full blown, completely new functionality. I can create the system I would want to use if I was doing the clients job every day. All with the clear conscience that Microsoft themselves will do the upgrade for me, at the slowest biannually, with Business Central.

To say that’s liberating for us consultants is an understatement. It’s back to how I spent the 90’s and early 00’s, completely focused on my users experience and making the system do exactly what the client business needed. Difference is, now I’m not creating technical debt to the level where some of those older systems have still not been able to upgrade to even RTC. These days though I’ve got the holy grail of being able to quickly create what each user truly needs, without the guilt that I’m building up an un-upgradeable hell.

Guus, why should we be selling systems ‘as standard’ when the customer can pay for, say just a day’s development time and get a solution, complete with automated tests, that saves them hours each subsequent day or even a week? Don’t think that possible? Well you haven’t spent as much time in the guts of BC and VSCode recently, as you need to.

Let’s take interfaces. Rekeying data is universally disliked right? Every client wants a ’connected system’ so my record is twenty-seven separate interfaces for a single implementation but it’s not unusual for its to get to double figures these days. Yes, I know you’ve now got the data exchange framework and a reliable multitasking job queue these days but they are just components for a developer. Go look at both and you’ll see that unless you have a developer to create processing reports or codeunits, your toast unless its ludicrously basic. Data Exchange Framework expects you to specify which codeunits to translate or validate for example, but doesn’t provide any. How does that work without the developers to create them?

If partners are complaining that they are constrained by the lack of developers, one reason is the limited new functionality from Microsoft (when was the last new feature added to sales documents which is the most used feature for example, their platform progress is epic but the core app could do more in my view) verses ever higher expectations from clients. The result is partners have to cut more code than they have ever done to keep the product’s business delivery competitive. Mega cutting edge platform or not, it has to support the business process it’s bought for and that means filling in the gaps.  

Then there’s the economics of it. With the demise of the ‘significant licence margin’ thanks to the advent of subscription, partners have two alternative sources of revenue. First obviously option is professional services but that’s not going to work if all the consultant says for that expensive day rate is ‘use it the standard way’ or alternatively ‘I can get a developer to do that but its going to be late next year before we can deliver’. The perverse incentive is that complex development projects with lots of ‘days’ are more attractive now to commission hunting salespeople than selling CSP subscriptions. When they can’t get the people to deliver those days, they are going to ask people like you if ‘you know any’.

The other way to keep that nice lifestyle they’ve become very used to, is selling the same standard IP repeatedly. Write once, sell forever is the dream but again thanks to Microsoft, that fantasy has current exploded. With C/AL and CFMD etc. my code lasted largely intact, for decades. Now every client’s first questions is ‘is it be available for Business Central’?  We are back in that fantasy land if you think that’s just a ‘quick conversion’.

The reality is that partner experiencing ever higher demand from existing customers and trying frantically to rewrite/restructure whatever reusable code they have, just to stay in the game. Then you add the vast amount of ‘new techniques’ that our developer now really to adapt (come along to my session at DirectionsNA and DirectionsEmea if you want to know what they are and why they are essential) on top of an all in a new language and developer environment and wonder why they are struggling to keep up?

If this sounds like I’ve pleading the case for partners not having enough resource, then I need to set you straight. What you should be saying Guus is not ‘sell standard’ but ‘your reaping what you’ve sowed’. Most partners that I know have done zero investment in developing new people with developer skills in the last decade. Maybe it’s just the UK market which I know best but the majority of partners have preferred to poach and import than consider investing in new people for as long as I can remember.

That’s the scandal that we are now reaping the reward from. My guess is that the average age of NAV developers is at best early-forties and its only recently trainees have been taken on, since the millennium.

In the UK, I was one of a group partners who created a developer training course and ran it for five years. From memory Cambridge Online put four trainees through, Turnkey three, Cooper Parry two, three others out one on. Staggeringly, a couple of the partners who help pay to create the course never used it!

Over that five years my company put seventeen fresh graduate trainees through it, fifteen are still with us, one decided he didn’t like it three months in and one didn’t make the grade. The average age of our dev crew is as a result, just thirty-one. The first one’s through are now senior dev’s who notably have got to the level where I’d back them to teach all that new stuff rather than need teaching.

Think I’m kidding, well come visit and I’ll introduce you to the twenty five year old female dev that not just written one of our most popular products (three figure customers) in C/AL, now converted it to AL, put all the .NET calls into Azure functions but created hundreds of AL tests to ensure its quality before we submitted it to AppSource. I’d rate her skills are up there with my fellow ‘developer specialist MVP’s’.

Guus, the message to your partners should not be ‘sell standard’, that simply not tenable in todays world. It’s the less palatable ‘if you want your future to be as good as your past, your going go have really to invest in skills now’. The good news is that thanks to people like the whole Cloud Ready team and Luc Van Vugt on top of Microsoft’s vastly improved delivery with ReadyToGo its never been easier.  

Please don’t think I’m saying we have done enough, having witnessed the payback, I wish we’d invested twice what we did. The really bad news is that for the first four years we only inducted developers so ended up with an imbalance in skill sets. I thought it would be harder to do consultants because of the ‘commercial experience’ they would need. It was only last year we tried a programme of five for the first time and been stunned by how quickly they went from useful to indispensable. But that a story for another day.

But at least we got started and today 25% of our people have come through the trainee programme meaning we have been able to grow much faster than we could have done without. Maybe I’m wrong but I think too many others just milked the immediate present with no thought to the future. Now they are complaining that it’s slowing them down?  You didn’t have to be Einstein to see these changes coming. It’s simply payback for what they put in. if you didn’t invest why should you expect the results?

The sooner we all stop paying obscene recruitment fees to pass mainly the worst people (we all hang on to our best whatever it takes) round our community and invest in a long-term skills programme, the sooner we will all be able to focus back on selling more.