When I was a child, I remember spending hours playing with LEGO, attempting to build some incredible structure that hadn’t been attempted before, using half from my Star Wars set and half from my Pirate set to build a spaceship to enable Han Solo to race Captain Hook through the skies and seas.

Looking back at these memories there are a lot of similarities between these processes and the process an organisation can go through when it comes to working with Dynamics 365. A Dynamics 365 or CRM project, can often seem like a daunting task as it’s so broad and is a business aligned need. It’s not an IT function such as ‘we need a new email server’ it’s more of a business aligned solution which has people saying ‘we need to work more efficiently’.

This can lead to the ‘creative block’ that can be felt when staring at an empty Word document, or a pile of LEGO bricks, which could be put together in hundreds of combinations to achieve the end result. Again, this is where LEGO and Dynamics 365 share a similarity as there are hundreds of pre-made blueprints for what you may desire, and you may be lucky enough to use one of these off the shelf solutions. If you want to make a LEGO spaceship, then follow the guide, if you want a brand-new service desk then you may be able to use an out-the-box service desk set up by Dynamics 365.

Unfortunately, business requirements do not exist in a vacuum and often there are legacy processes, systems and technology to take into account, meaning in many situations we cannot follow the blueprint guide. This is where a Dynamics 365 consultant can help guide an organisation to find out their requirements and build them a solution to meet these, while incorporating the off-brand block pieces which may not fit the usual blueprints.

LEGO for me was always an ongoing project, I could always add another tower to my castle, or build a rival spaceship better than the last one, and this is where Dynamics 365 excels itself as a solution. I always built LEGO with the next project in mind, and all Dynamics 365 projects should be the same. If you spend a significant portion of your budget on building a solution, you must ensure that it’s going to be built for growth and is able to adapt with the organisation for the next decade. Only by using the Microsoft Cloud can you do this, with room to add entirely new departments onto the solution such as Marketing or to add in new business applications as they are required.

The core comparison between the two is that you get out from them what you put in. If you make a simple house out of a few LEGO blocks and don’t spend much time on it, you may be able to build your first home. However, we all know how quickly we grow out of them. Just like Dynamics 365, LEGO can be anything you dream it to be, it has a world of potential to build into magnificent bespoke structures that can do just about anything, even have Han Solo race Captain Hook. Organisations can always look to improve their existing ERP and CRM systems and moving them to the cloud is like having an unlimited supply of LEGO Blocks and blueprints, just waiting for a Master Builder to unlock the potential.

About the author