Scottish Tech Army: Digital Consultancy Projects
Voluntary digital systems consultancy for third-sector organisations - CRM discovery, Power Platform architecture, automation, and service design.
Scottish Tech Army · Voluntary · Dynamics 365 CRM · Dataverse · Power Platform · Power Pages · Model-Driven Apps · Microsoft Entra · SharePoint · WordPress · Power Apps · AI
About This Work
Scottish Tech Army (STA) is a volunteer network that connects skilled professionals with charities and third-sector organisations. The engagements described on this page are voluntary consultancy projects: structured, technically substantive, and carried out alongside my paid role at UCL STEaPP. They demonstrate systems analysis, stakeholder communication, discovery methodology, Power Platform investigation and practical digital transformation support in resource-constrained environments.
Three engagements have been undertaken to date. One is complete (Digital Xtra), one concluded early (Nursery project), and one is in active development (Connecting Carers).
Digital Xtra
Nov 2024 – May 2025. Rebuilt the legacy grant evaluation system for a Scottish digital charity using Power Apps and AI. The evaluation cycle - previously weeks - reduced to hours. Presented to directors on completion.
Tools: Power Apps · AI automation · Microsoft 365
Nursery Project
Documentation and instructional materials around a new system built by another volunteer. Engagement ended when the nursery adopted a commercial platform - a reminder that third-sector volunteer projects can end this way.
Tools: Instructional design · documentation
Connecting Carers
2025–present. Dynamics 365 CRM discovery and design for a national charity supporting unpaid carers. Three formal reports delivered through Analysis and Design phases. Now in Development.
Tools: Dynamics 365 · Dataverse · Power Platform · Power Pages · Entra
Digital Xtra - Grant Evaluation System Rebuild
November 2024 – May 2025 · Completed
Digital Xtra is a Scottish digital charity that uses a grant evaluation process to assess applications from individuals and organisations seeking funding. The existing process was largely manual and took weeks of effort from the evaluation panel and the Partnerships Manager to complete each cycle. The brief was to rebuild it - making it more user-friendly for the evaluation panel, easier to manage administratively, and significantly faster.
The rebuilt system used Microsoft Power Apps and AI to automate the grant evaluation workflow end to end - from application intake through to panel scoring and reporting. The full evaluation cycle - which had previously taken the panel and administrative staff several weeks to complete - was reduced to hours. On completion, I presented the outcomes directly to the organisation's directors. The evaluation panel gave positive feedback, and the project was delivered on time.
See the Workflow Automation page and the About page for more context on this project.
Nursery Project - Instructional Design (Concluded)
A brief engagement to create documentation and instructional materials around a new digital system that had been built by another volunteer for a nursery organisation. The work involved understanding an undocumented system and producing clear guidance for non-technical staff. The engagement ended when the nursery decided to discontinue the volunteer-built system and adopt a commercial product instead - a decision entirely within their rights, and a reminder that third-sector volunteer projects do not always have a defined endpoint.
Connecting Carers - CRM Discovery, Design & Development
2025 – Present · In Development (Analysis and Design phases complete)
Connecting Carers is a national charity supporting unpaid carers across Scotland. The engagement is a voluntary consultancy - the most technically complex STA project I have undertaken - involving a Dynamics 365 CRM system, a public-facing website, Power Platform infrastructure, and a fragmented set of processes that had grown incrementally over several years.
Three formal reports were produced through the Analysis and Design phases, each addressing a different layer of the organisation's digital estate. The project has now moved into Development - implementing the joined-up solution shaped by those discovery and design findings.
Report 1: Power Platform App Setup
A detailed technical review of the existing Power Platform environment - documenting what apps existed, how they were built, what data they used, what permissions controlled access, and where the fragilities and single points of failure were. This was discovery-first work: understanding what existed before making any recommendations about what should change.
Report 2: Website Review
An assessment of the public-facing website - its content management approach, how registration and enquiry forms connected to back-end systems, whether a development or staging environment existed, and how the website related to the broader digital ecosystem. A key finding was that the website and the CRM/Power Platform systems were not integrated in the way that staff believed them to be.
Report 3: Dynamics 365 Integration
An exploration of how Dynamics 365 CRM was being used operationally - which views were used for which jobs, how records moved through the system, where manual re-entry was occurring, and what the relationship was between the CRM Hub and Customer Service Hub. This analysis moved from a system audit to a service design exercise: mapping how data moved through the organisation, not just how the technology worked.
Dynamics CRM Discovery: Key Findings
The discovery identified that confusion around the system stemmed less from technical failure and more from unclear process ownership - where a person first enters the system, how a record becomes an enquiry or case, which teams touch the record at each stage, and whether information is being re-entered manually at system transitions.
The Connecting Carers Live Power Platform environment - confirmed as Production, Europe region, with Dynamics 365 and Dataverse active.
Dataverse entity relationships for the Connecting Carers model - showing the breadth of connected activities, cases and communications mapped during discovery.
Power Platform as Single Source of Truth
A clear direction emerging from the work is the potential to use Power Platform and Dataverse as the central source of truth - replacing fragmented data managed across multiple systems with a consistent, structured model that different interfaces (Canvas Apps, Power Pages, model-driven apps) could read from and write to. External users would submit through Power Pages; internal administrators would use model-driven apps; operational staff would use lighter Canvas Apps where appropriate.
Governance Principles
- Don't change live systems without a tested staging environment
- Store data once - avoid duplication that requires manual synchronisation
- Match the interface to the user, not the developer
- Plan for the person who comes next - systems built for one volunteer should not collapse when that volunteer moves on
- The right question is not "what can the technology do?" but "what does the organisation actually need, and can they sustain it?"
"Richard is a skilled volunteer and I've worked with him on two projects at the Scottish Tech Army. He brings his deep and wide technical knowledge to helping charities, generous with his time and collaborative in his approach. His ability to delve into and understand undocumented technical environments has been invaluable."
Licensing, Permissions & Governance
A significant strand of the Connecting Carers discovery was establishing what Microsoft licences the organisation held - because licence availability directly affects which solutions are realistic. A technically elegant proposal that requires a licence the organisation does not hold is worthless. Working with Global Reader access in the Entra admin centre, the discovery aimed to establish what was already covered, who had the permissions to confirm it, and whether a technical volunteer or Microsoft admin contact would be needed for any changes.
Related Prior Context: IKON Training Digital Transformation (2022–24)
Before the STA engagements, the most technically demanding business integration project in this portfolio was the IKON Training TMS build - a full end-to-end implementation of an integrated Training Management System (Arlo + Power Automate + Moodle + SharePoint + SurveyMonkey) completed in six months as sole internal technical lead, with go-live in April 2023. The STA work draws on the practical skills developed there: requirements analysis, data architecture, API integration, automation workflow development, stakeholder training and documentation.
Read the IKON case study →Skills Demonstrated
Technical Discovery
- Dynamics 365 CRM investigation
- Dataverse / Power Platform review
- Microsoft Entra permissions analysis
- Data flow mapping across systems
- WordPress and web integration assessment
- Licence and environment discovery
- Power Apps and AI automation
Service Design
- Stakeholder discovery and mapping
- Service touchpoint analysis
- Identifying the true source of truth
- User journey tracing through systems
- Governance and sustainability thinking
- Solution scoping for resource-constrained organisations
Communication
- Plain English technical reporting
- Non-technical director communication
- Presenting outcomes to organisational leadership
- Volunteer role definition and briefing
- Formal multi-report discovery documentation