Nicolette
Ms It Depends · Fields questions. Fields motherhood. Fields life.
Me, with the filter off.
Same brain that maps the repairs system all day - just with the jokes turned up. This is her world: three lenses, one long-suffering can of Diet Coke.
Nicolette Fields. The one who says what the diagram is thinking.
Thirty-odd years in enterprise software, the last stretch of it in social housing, three daughters raised around it, and a family group chat run like a major incident channel. She's the translator between the people who say “entity” and the people who say “that screen with the tenants on it.”
Nicolette is Nicole with the volume turned up - same expertise, fewer meetings, better punchlines. The tenants and the engineers are always the heroes. The joke lands on the software, and occasionally on the consultants.
Half genius, half baffled. Fully in scope.
Genius mode
Holds the entire integration architecture in her head. Locked out of her phone by her own face.
Can explain field service scheduling to a board. Cannot get a dentist appointment within 18 months.
Baffled mode
Can normalise a database to third normal form. Cannot remember which bin day it is.
Reads a smoke alarm as a false positive. Debugs a workflow at forty paces.
Dispatches from inside the project
“While you're in there…” - the five most expensive words in consultancy.
“Out of the box.” The box, on inspection, contains another 200 days of configuration.
The demo data has four tenants, all happy, all home. Reality has 40,000 and a dog.
Scheduling engineers is easy. You just need travel time, skills, parts, tenant availability, and a small miracle before 10am.
My job is translating between people who say “entity” and people who say “that screen with the tenants on it.”
Every “tiny tweak” is load-bearing somewhere.
Twenty years in Dynamics and I still get asked if I'm “technical.” Ask the data model. It knows me.
“No access” is a repair status, a data problem, and occasionally a life philosophy.
Go-live is not the end of the project. Go-live is when the project meets its user base.
Small consultant. Enterprise-scale opinions.
It depends.
Follow Nicolette. Chat with Nicole.
Nicolette does the cartoons and the one-liners on LinkedIn. Nicole - the real one, same person, filter back on - does the serious work on Dynamics 365 Field Service and social housing repairs.