[MUSIC]
>> My name is Brian Hodel.
I work at T-Mobile,
and I am a Developer on the
Microsoft Power Platform.
[MUSIC]
>> I'm involved with the
Orbit Solution Development,
which is a project
management platform
for customer facing initiatives
across the organization,
such as device promotions,
service offers, projects,
technology initiatives,
really anything that has a
customer impact goes through
this intake process
and it's reviewed by
executive team members and directors,
various levels VP's that
need to approve and
prioritize the resources
of the organization.
[MUSIC].
>> The organization, as
it grows very rapidly,
had not centralized
the intake process.
Different departments,
different needs,
different initiative types, had
different intake platforms.
There was no cohesive manner
for initiatives to be
reviewed and prioritized.
They'd have to go to
different systems.
Mostly Excel manual processes that
were very time-intensive,
labor-intensive solutions.
[MUSIC].
>> We opted for the Power
Platform because of
its ability to build
low code solutions
to meet the business needs and
rapidly changing environments
that we have at T-Mobile.
We're able to build custom
interfaces using Power Apps,
custom notification and approval
flows using Power Automate,
extensive reporting
capabilities through
Power BI that not only consolidated
our datasets that we needed,
but also legacy data that
is in other systems,
into a single place for executives
to review and prioritize initiatives.
[MUSIC]
>> My name is Arturo Silis.
Principal Systems
Architect at T-Mobile.
I am a mobile core network
Lead Architect for large-scale
project implementation.
At T-Mobile, we have
close to 900 App Makers and
just over 1,500 Flow Makers.
Together, we have built close
to 3,000 apps and 7,400 flows.
Just last month, 140 apps
and 400 flows where created.
[MUSIC].
>> The Power Platform
Champions Group at T-Mobile,
it's a diverse set of people
across the organization.
From retail, finance, legal,
sales, and of course, technology.
What brings us together,
is the excitement of
finding new ways to
solve everyday problems
via apps and flows.
Then realizing that as we
learn more about the platform,
we can tackle larger problems.
Becoming a Power Platform Developer
has given me the opportunity
to connect with T-Mobile employees
across the organization,
and share new ways to solve
problems and become more effective.
[MUSIC]
>> The first screen that any
user goes to when entering Orbit
is the initiative screen
showing all initiatives
that they have access to.
There is also the ability
to do filtering and sorting
by most of the fields
in this view, such as,
if you were to need only project
types or digital transformation,
depending on what you
were looking for,
you could easily find
that information.
You can also sort by variety
of dates and business owners.
There's an additional text field that
searches around seven or
eight different fields,
so you can look and find
across a bunch of
different queries the information
that you're looking for.
Clicking on any of these
initiatives takes you directly into
the summary screen of the initiative.
If you were to enter a project,
you would get a specific
summary of that project,
but also the fields in here are
related to that type of initiative.
For a project you get this
certain set of fields.
If you were to go into
a device promotion,
or a service offer,
or something else like that,
you would get a different
experience in here.
This view is specifically built
for executives to go
in and be able to see
what is going on with an
initiative at the level that
they need to be able to
see and take action on.
This gives a summary of
the key project stakeholders,
the situation description,
and key pieces of that initiative on
the bottom so that they can quickly
move through that initiative,
take action on what needs to be done.
If a user was to need to go into
the details of an initiative,
the "Details" tabs takes you into
a multi-section form that
is split out into "Basics",
"Product Details",
"Value Proposition",
"Financials", and "GTM Triage".
These specific sections are
available depending on
a user's permissions,
as well as the fields
that are in there,
are also tailored to
a user's permission.
The "Approvals" tab uses
custom connectors to pull in
information from the business
process flow back end.
Each initiative has a dynamically
built set of stages that
are determined as the approval
is created and assigned.
For projects there would
be a variety of stages,
there are seven stages in a project.
Whereas if it was a device promotion,
it may have three stages.
At each one of those stages,
a given number of approvers
are assigned to that stage,
and those are also pulled
into this dashboard.
From there, any approvers
are given initiative access,
view only, read only,
depending on what their level is,
and then they will be able to
go in and either approve or
reject with comments
those initiative steps.
The administration team can move
initiatives back and forth
through phases if they need.
There's a lot of flexibility in
this custom workflow without
having a lot of custom-built code.
On the "Approval" page,
you can see with the active stages.
When a stage changes,
it kicks off this flow,
which then runs through
the conditions and either
assigns users to the flow
or documents certain
information about that flow.
This runs the entire back end
process for every stage change.
The "Teams" tab allows sponsors
to add and remove users
from different roles
within the project so they're clearly
identified as well as their
permissions of view and edit.
This functionality is achieved once
again through custom connectors and
leveraging the capabilities of
the CDS model in the back end.
The "Attachments" page is also a
dynamic depending on
which type of initiative,
because every initiative has
specific set of required documents,
so there are placeholders
for those documents,
so you can visually see
what has been added,
what has been updated,
what needs to be added.
There's also BAO server
functionality to give you
details and document revision
history on this tab.
There's heavy use of
components within this view,
but all of this is done through
custom connectors, again,
leveraging the back
end of CDS so that we
can store documents
and metadata about
those documents within CDS
and make them easily
accessible to the users.
Throughout the app, we use
components extensively.
On this view, the left
nav and the top nav,
as well as the initiative
header, are all components.
On the ListView, we
opted for components
to build the filter
dialogues as well.
Each "Filter" button opens up
a version of that component
that basically has parameters
passed into it to show
what it is filtering.
In this case it would be the phase,
it pulls in the types
of phase option sets,
or if it's a date picker,
it will show those fields.
When a user selects those
items within that component,
a query string is passed out of
the component in which we use in
the custom connector to feed to
the API to pull the initiatives back.
>> A model-driven app allows
the administrative
side to do a lot of
very custom activities
that we didn't feel
necessary to build
into the Orbit app.
There's a lot of bulk
activity, custom reporting,
a lot of different things that
we need to be able to look at,
a variety of fields very
closely and then different
views for different use cases.
That really isn't something that we
needed to spend development
time on the front end.
There's also the ability
to look at things like,
the team members, the audit
logs, e-mails, attachments.
A lot of times we
need to go in and get
more details and pull reports out
of these that we don't
necessarily have
reports built out yet in Power BI,
more ad hoc reporting capabilities.
>> Teams made sense to use in this
context because we could easily
tie together into a single location
all of the tools that surround Orbit.
We have Orbit itself,
which is the Power app.
We can also tie in
different business reports
from Power BI into different
tabs so that a user can go in
there and get more
detailed analytics and
visualizations than are
available in the Orbit app.
We're able to also have
specific files in here,
and user guides, and other
tools that are around Orbit.
This really brings together into
a single location and
a cohesive tool set.
>> Power Apps is really one
of those things that you can
build and customize to
exactly what you need,
which brings down the cost
of starting up that new
system significantly.
When you factor in all of
the training, the time,
the learning curves
and the support that
typically need to be
brought with those systems.