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November 04, 2021

T-Mobile adopts Microsoft Power Platform for fast and powerful low-code development

One of the largest wireless carriers in the United States, T-Mobile always seeks to improve its business processes and gain greater insight into operations. With low-code development using Microsoft Power Platform, T-Mobile employees from all different backgrounds—computer science experts to coding novices—now develop solutions themselves that help the company with everything from device promotion approvals to store closure management in response to COVID-19. T-Mobile has a thriving internal Microsoft Power Platform community and is creating a T-Mobile Center of Excellence to promote further low-code development.

T-Mobile

Embracing low-code and no-code development

Application development has long been the domain of highly trained professionals who use sophisticated software and complex languages to create programs that may have tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code. While this is still the preferred development model for many enterprise-grade applications, the increasing popularity of low-code and no-code development tools has added a new branch to the app creation path.

This change has opened up new opportunities for employees who don’t have a computer science background, and they aren’t the only ones who benefit. Professional developers are also using the new development tools to augment their standard work. For developers who have moved into new roles where coding is no longer their primary focus, low-code development provides a way to tap into their creative passion without the extensive time investment that goes along with traditional coding.

Wireless carrier T-Mobile has enthusiastically embraced low-code development with Microsoft Power Platform, including Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Automate. Employees throughout the company use Microsoft Power Platform to create solutions ranging from niche tools for specialized uses to enterprise-wide applications for dealing with the impact of COVID-19.

Building a community of low-code developers

Arturo Silis has been with T-Mobile for 13 years. In his current role as a Principal Engineer, Systems Architecture, he connects with teams across different business and technology domains within the company to coordinate their work. He helps evaluate the business requirements for new projects and then uses that knowledge to define the functional requirements. As part of this role, he took on the task of automating project tracking from requirements gathering through deployment, using both Power Automate and Power Apps.

“In my role as a lead architect, I have to do a lot of reporting to senior leadership about where we are with the different stages of development projects,” Silis explains. “So, I built a Power Apps application where engineers enter information about the current state of their development. I use that information to build up Power BI reports that give insight to senior leadership about where we are, how many projects we have, which resources are assigned, and other points of interest. Using Power Apps made the whole process very easy.”

Silis comes from a computer science background. He’s been doing development work for a long time and is comfortable with coding. For him, Microsoft Power Platform offers a way to create solutions much more easily and quickly. Even though his primary role is as an architect, using Microsoft Power Platform lets him keep one foot in the development world and help deliver solutions that benefit the whole company. 

As part of his learning process, Silis got involved in online communities for Microsoft Power Platform development so that he could become more proficient with Power Apps and Power Automate. Because of his enthusiastic participation, he was invited to become part of the Microsoft Power Apps Champions program, which recognizes leaders in the Power Apps community who go out of their way to help fellow members and share their expertise. This eventually led him to create a Power Apps community within T-Mobile.

“As more and more T-Mobile employees discovered Power Apps and Power Automate, people started coming to me with their questions,” says Silis. “I always like teaching and sharing, and I’m excited about the platform, so I was happy to help. It was almost becoming an informal job role for me to assist people with Microsoft Power Platform development.”

Around this time, T-Mobile started using Microsoft Teams, so Silis created a team within it called the T-Mobile Internal Community Group for Microsoft Power Platform development. Silis uses it as a forum where people can ask questions and where he hosts monthly hour-long presentations that sometimes feature Microsoft employees talking about new Microsoft Power Platform features or functionality or answering particularly challenging development questions. The team currently has 240 members, and each monthly session draws an audience of about 50. Silis records the Teams meetings and posts them to Microsoft SharePoint and the Microsoft Stream channel, and he is exploring more advanced Teams features.

Silis views Microsoft Power Platform as an exciting way to keep close to his development roots while still working in his primary role. “It’s like I get to have a parallel job within the company that keeps me in touch with my passion for computer science and coding,” he says. “And T-Mobile appreciates that I’m able to do my system architect work and at the same time use Power Apps to quickly solve problems for our internal customers. That makes me a lot more productive.”

Responding quickly to COVID-19 for business continuity

Matt McDermott started working in the mobile industry as a sales representative before moving up to store manager, and he now works at T-Mobile as a Senior Business Analysis Manager for T-Mobile. He focuses on business analysis and planning to help drive the company’s success by understanding its strengths and its opportunities. With his retail experience, he has great insight into what store managers need to be successful.

McDermott has some background in 3D animation and graphic design, but prior to using Microsoft Power Platform, he hadn’t done much development work. “I knew that T-Mobile had a Microsoft 365 subscription, so when I read about Power Apps, I just hopped in there and started trying it,” says McDermott. “Having some exposure to other languages helped me pick it up quite quickly. Power Apps is simple, but it’s still robust enough to be able to do a lot of things that other low-code environments can’t.”

For McDermott, the potential impacts of Power Apps really became apparent when COVID-19 spread across the country and forced retail store closures and staffing adjustments. Like many companies, T-Mobile quickly developed processes for managing this unprecedented state of affairs, but they weren’t necessarily the most efficient methods.

“We emailed a lot of spreadsheets back and forth, with more email threads for approvals,” explains McDermott. “As COVID-19 spread further, the need for an optimized solution became really apparent. I didn’t want to spend my days downloading spreadsheets from email, editing them, and sending them back. It was just too manual and inefficient.”

McDermott had already been doing some Power Apps development for field sales data analysis, so he knew right away that he wanted to use Microsoft Power Platform to create a solution for monitoring store closures. In less than 48 hours, he’d built a functioning app that runs on a computer, a smartphone, or a tablet. The app also offers other advantages over the manual method.

“Unlike when we email spreadsheets, we keep all the data from the app stored internally in SQL Server, which is much more secure and also helps ensure that we always display the most current information, like real-time updates on changing store hours and closures,” he says.

The success of the store closure app led T-Mobile to develop two more apps related to COVID-19—an employee roster app for managing staffing at stores and a self-screening wellness app that employees use as part of the screening process to check whether they can safely work at stores that are still open. McDermott continues to update the apps with new functionality. For example, employees now also use the store closure app to easily handle inventory replenishment and stop deliveries or reroute them to another store.

Power Apps Screenshot
Figure 1. Power Apps solution built during COVID-19 shutdown for employees to share their availability status. 

“You just can’t do all these things through spreadsheets exchanged in email,” McDermott says. “Because we’re working with live data, we have a lot more flexibility to automate processes. It really helps our district managers make sure that open stores have sufficient staffing. That, combined with the ability to control inventory and make sure we have the right product in the right locations, makes us a much more successful company overall.

For more information about the apps that T-Mobile created to help address COVID-19 challenges, read this blog post.

Bridging the gap between business and development

Brian Hodel, a Principal Power Platform Developer, joined T-Mobile to work on an app called Orbit, which employees across the company use to manage and approve new initiatives like device promotions and service offers. Orbit uses Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, along with Microsoft Dataverse, and the app also ties into Teams.

Orbit App Solution Architecture
Figure 2. High-level solution architecture of the Orbit app.

Hodel comes from a background in applied computing, and Microsoft Power Platform helps him pursue his enthusiasm for finding common ground between developers and business employees. “I wanted to be able to work with business users but also understand the development teams,” he explains. “With Microsoft Power Platform, I can quickly build tools that drive process improvement to make everyday business run better.”

From his first exposure to Microsoft Power Platform, Hodel saw the potential for a vast number of use cases. As someone with development experience, he felt that the platform offers advantages over traditional development models.

“I’ve always liked that Microsoft Power Platform development is really fast,” he says. “You don’t have to worry about spending all the time it usually takes to create the back end—a lot of that technical layer is already built for you. You can start with what you really want to do, which is create an interface and functionality to solve a problem or make some process run more smoothly.”

With the success of his work, Hodel has become a resource for other T-Mobile employees who are creating their own Microsoft Power Platform solutions. And he’s working on creating a T-Mobile Center of Excellence for Microsoft Power Platform development to help as many people as possible.

“We’re trying to make Microsoft Power Platform available to all employees in a way that introduces them to the tools and helps them go in and create their own solutions to business problems,” says Hodel. “At the same time, we’ll offer guidance and connections to IT team members plus monitor development so that no one gets into technical trouble. For example, if someone wants to use premium connectors, they’ll need to get approval.”

To manage the risk of data being accidentally sent outside of the organization, T-Mobile has removed certain connectors from the default environment. System administrators set up new environments with custom data loss prevention settings for developers who need access to these connectors to share data outside the organization. This helps developers better protect sensitive data, and it helps the platform and security teams put in guardrails to identify and monitor activity. Further customizations for the Center of Excellence will help T-Mobile better measure and react to usage patterns such as new connector usage, user volumes, and storage needs.

Hodel’s work on the Orbit app takes advantage of the interoperability between Microsoft Power Platform and Teams. Orbit is embedded in a Teams tab, along with associated Power BI reports, for easy access to a single source of Orbit-related information. With adaptive cards in Teams, project members can customize news feeds and easily identify and interact with initiatives. The app uses Power Automate to orchestrate approval requests, and it uses Power BI dashboards and reports to visualize the progress of initiatives.

For Hodel, one of the notable advantages of Microsoft Power Platform is the way it unlocks the creativity within any employee who has an interest in programming. “You can turn your ideas into reality in a surprisingly short amount of time,” he says. “The platform helps you grow very naturally from simple tasks to more complex concepts. And as you figure out new capabilities, your applications become more sophisticated and advanced. It’s a tremendous learning tool in addition to being a great programming environment.”

Accelerating growth of low-code solutions with licensing that scales with ease

A recent and exciting byproduct of T-Mobile’s fusion team approach to developing low-code solutions—combining all levels of business and technical knowledge—is the decision to use pay-as-you-go licensing for Power Platform subscriptions. Rather than purchasing bulk licenses as solutions scale, the pay-as-you-go option automates the arduous license procurement process. This ultimately removes several barriers to launching solutions that solve immediate business challenges.

Pay-as-you-go licensing for Power Platform further accelerates T-Mobile’s low-code digital transformation by removing friction as its solutions scale across the business.

“One of the great things about Power Platform is the ability to provision a team an environment, and they can build, test, and deploy solutions without having to constantly pull in other teams for provisioning databases, granting access to resources, or procuring licenses,” says Hodel.  

“Pay as you go for Power Platform further reduces reliance on external teams and resources by automating the license procurement, assignment, scaling, and billing so development teams can focus on what is important, solving problems and pleasing customers. Pay-as-you-go licensing also greatly reduces the friction of starting up new solutions or POCs—instead of planning for the end state to procure bulk licensing, this payment structure allows the licensing to scale with our solutions as they grow.” 

For technical details on the Orbit app, please visit the T-Mobile Power Platform blog post.

“Power Apps is simple, but it’s still robust enough to be able to do a lot of things that other low-code environments can’t.”

Matt McDermott, Business Analysis Manager, T-Mobile

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