A team had sat through vendor training and come away with little. Mark Lucas took a different path: hands-on coaching on the work they actually do every day. It grew into working side by side, automating their own tasks together. By the end, one task that took 40 hours by hand was running in minutes.
| Client | Global financial-services firm (anonymized) |
| Engagement | Hands-on Power Platform coaching and enablement |
| Role | Lead coach and consultant, Mark Lucas |
| Stack | Microsoft Power Platform · 30 years on the Microsoft stack |
to do the task by hand, before
to run it now, after
not handed over, so the skill stays
The team had been talked at for hours in earlier vendor training and built almost nothing. Mark flipped it. Every session used their actual workflows, hands on keyboard from the first minute. No slides, no hypotheticals.
It grew from there. What started as scheduled sessions turned into Mark working side by side with people, sitting with each one and automating the tasks that were quietly eating their week. The coaching and the building were the same activity.
"Their earlier training from a major software vendor stalled on technical issues. We spent the whole session troubleshooting instead of learning to build." — Process engineer, global financial-services firm
By the end of the engagement, team members were building and deploying their own automations instead of waiting on a small internal platform team. One task makes the point. A complex, recurring job that used to take roughly 40 hours by hand now finishes in minutes, and the person who runs it built it during the coaching.
"This used to take me about 40 hours by hand. Now it runs in minutes." — Process engineer, global financial-services firm
Mark doesn't build a tool and walk away. Because the work was theirs and their hands were on the keyboard, the capability stays after he's gone. Automate the mechanical part, leave the judgment with the expert, and the team keeps building on their own. That's the difference between a deliverable and a team that levels up.
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