Define roles and responsibilities

2025-05-14

Defining roles and responsibilities is key to successfully adopting Power Platform because it ensures clarity, accountability, and efficiency. This approach fosters collaboration, aligns initiatives with strategic goals, and ensures compliance and security.

When planning your Power Platform Center of Excellence, it’s essential to assign well-defined roles and responsibilities to the growing group of stakeholders. As engagements evolve, the stakeholder groups expand, requiring more granular roles and actions to be tracked against responsible individuals. A well-constructed RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix brings clarity to roles and responsibilities, ensuring smoother management.

Define clear roles and responsibilities to support:

Accountability: Ensure that everyone knows their specific duties, which helps to hold individuals accountable for their tasks.
Efficiency: Clearly define roles to prevent overlap and redundancy and make efficient use of resources and time.
Collaboration: Foster better collaboration and communication among team members, as everyone understands their role in the bigger picture.
Consistency: Maintain consistency in processes and practices, which is crucial for scaling and sustaining the adoption of Power Platform.
Governance: Establish clear governance roles to ensure that policies and procedures are followed and that the platform is used securely and compliantly.
Empowerment: Empower team members by providing them with a clear understanding of their roles and tasks so that they feel confident.
Clarity: Provide clear roles and responsibilities to help citizen makers know whom to contact for approvals, ensuring that activities are authorized efficiently and correctly.

To adopt Power Platform successfully, balance opportunity realization with risk mitigation. This balance depends on three key tenets: goal clarity, role clarity, and task clarity. In this article, you learn how to identify the roles and responsibilities involved in Power Platform adoption, outline the tasks and initiatives they undertake, and establish a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix to bring clarity to these roles and responsibilities.

Goal clarity

Goal clarity helps everyone understand the objectives and purpose of their work. Clear goals provide direction and motivation, helping team members align their efforts with the organization's strategic aims.

Imagine in a year's time that Power Platform is well adopted and governed within your organization. How might things be different for you and users? Would you see more streamlined processes, with makers efficiently creating and managing solutions that drive business value? Would the platform be used to its full potential, fostering innovation and collaboration across departments?

Without proper governance, significant risks may arise. Poor governance can lead to security vulnerabilities, data breaches, and noncompliance with industry regulations. It can also result in inefficient use of resources, with duplicated efforts and misaligned projects. Equally, without an enablement plan for makers, they might miss discovering the benefits of Power Platform, struggle to find appropriate resources internally, or lack awareness of its capabilities, leading to a poor return on investment. Ensuring goal clarity is a critical step in mitigating these risks and achieving successful Power Platform adoption.

Call to action: Conduct a workshop with key stakeholders to define and document clear goals for Power Platform adoption. Focus on aligning these goals with the organization's strategic aims, identifying potential risks, and establishing governance practices to mitigate those risks. Ensure that all participants understand the importance of goal clarity and how it drives successful adoption and governance of the platform.

Learn more: Develop a vision for adopting Power Platform

Role clarity

When adopting Power Platform, it's important to achieve role clarity and define roles within your organization. Clear roles and responsibilities ensure that everyone understands their tasks, which leads to more efficient and effective collaboration. It also helps in avoiding overlaps and gaps in responsibilities, ensuring that all aspects of the adoption process are covered.

Consider the roles responsible for performing actions, as well as the roles that need to be consulted and informed. This approach ensures that all stakeholders are engaged and that the adoption process is inclusive and comprehensive.

As adoption matures, the roles within your organization may need to adapt. Initially, one person might fulfill multiple roles, but as the organization grows and the adoption process becomes more complex, you find you need to refine and expand those roles based on team needs and feedback. Similarly, roles might vary based on the organization's size and the maturity of its roles and capabilities.

The next section explores the key roles typically involved in Power Platform adoption and how they contribute to its success.

Strategic and executive roles

Power Platform product owner: Oversee the strategic direction, governance, and management of Power Platform. Set the vision and roadmap for Power Platform to align with organizational goals, ensure compliance with policies and regulations, and manage the overall governance framework.
Leadership/Executives: Guide the strategic direction and ensure alignment of Power Platform initiatives with business objectives. Promote user adoption and ensure adequate resourcing.
Change management: Manage the transition and adoption of Power Platform, ensuring smooth implementation and user acceptance.
Business analysts: Identify business needs and develop solutions using Power Platform to meet those needs. Ensure alignment with organizational goals.
Project management office: Ensure that low-code projects are managed in accordance with organizational project standards and controls. Provide oversight and governance to ensure successful project delivery.

Administration and governance

Power Platform admins: Administer Power Platform, manage security settings, monitor performance, and troubleshoot issues. This team is responsible for platform health, hygiene, and monitoring, and for implementing guardrails and maintaining ongoing security posture.
Power Platform environment admins: Oversee the management and configuration of Power Platform environments. This team performs similar tasks to the Platform admins but are delegated to a smaller subsection of the organization.
Information Governance team: Ensure that information generated and consumed is appropriately handled, maintaining compliance with data protection and regulatory standards.
Information Security and Compliance team: Ensure that Power Platform complies with industry regulations and internal policies. This team ensures that Power Platform meets organizational cybersecurity objectives and complies with AI regulations.

Support and enablement

Community and enablement leads: Provide training and support to Power Platform users, ensuring they understand and can effectively use the tools. This role helps adopters get the best out of the platform through training, guidance, and peer support. This role often establishes a champion community by identifying and training enthusiastic users, fostering collaboration, and recognizing contributions to sustain engagement and knowledge sharing.
IT operations (support): Provide frontline support for apps and solutions built on the platform, addressing user issues and ensuring smooth operation.
Azure service administrator: Oversee the administration of Azure services at a tenant level. They support Power Platform admins with configuring Azure features, such as setting up an Azure Application Insight instance or an Azure storage account to support monitoring.
Microsoft 365 admin: Support the Power Platform team with administrative functions in Microsoft 365, such as license assignment and user configuration.
Other service admins: Service specific admin roles that administer services like Copilot, Power BI, and Microsoft Teams to ensure proper configuration and support. They support Power Platform admins with service-specific administrative functions.

Development and architecture

Makers (citizen to pro-devs): Use the platform effectively to solve business problems while staying within supported guardrails.
DevOps engineer: Bridge development and operations, implementing and automating processes to enhance the software development lifecycle. They help configure continuous integration and delivery, improving efficiency and reliability.
Enterprise architects: Design and oversee the architecture of Power Platform to align with organizational technology strategies. They ensure integration with line-of-business (LOB) systems and determine criteria for when to use Power Platform versus other systems.
Solution architects: Develop and derive solutions architecture, ensuring they meet business needs and technical requirements using Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Azure services.

Data and AI

Data stewards: Maintain data quality, security, and compliance. They establish data governance policies and manage access permissions.
AI strategist: Align AI strategy with business objectives, ensuring that AI initiatives support and enhance organizational goals.
Ethics officer: Monitor AI ethical standards and compliance by conducting AI ethics review processes and risk assessment reports. They ensure responsible AI standards are followed and incorporated into projects involving AI features.

End users

End users: Use Power Platform for daily tasks, benefiting from its capabilities to improve productivity and efficiency.

Task clarity

Task clarity refers to the clear definition and understanding of the specific tasks that need to be completed. Through task clarity, each team member knows exactly what is expected of them, including the steps and standards required to accomplish their tasks. This clarity helps reduce confusion, improves efficiency, and ensures that everyone works towards the same objectives.

To identify and define tasks:

Break down goals: Start by breaking down the overall goals into smaller, manageable tasks. This exercise helps identify what needs to be done to achieve the larger objectives.
Assign responsibilities: Assign each task to a specific role or individual. Make sure that everyone knows their responsibilities and how their tasks contribute to the overall goals.
Detail steps and standards: Define the steps required to complete each task and the standards to meet. For example, specify deadlines, quality expectations, and any necessary resources.
Communicate clearly: Ensure that all team members are aware of their tasks and have the information they need to complete them. Regular communication helps address any uncertainties and keeps everyone aligned.
Monitor and adjust: Continuously monitor the progress of tasks and make adjustments as needed. This approach ensures that tasks are completed effectively and issues are addressed promptly.

As you identify and define tasks, consider how your organization's current processes can be applied to Power Platform. Key factors to consider include:

Cybersecurity review requirements: Define the specific scenarios and thresholds that necessitate a cybersecurity review to ensure the app meets organizational security standards.
Business/architectural/security impact assessments: Conduct thorough assessments to evaluate the potential impacts on business operations, system architecture, and security posture.
Project sizing and delivery standards: Establish clear guidelines for estimating project scope and adhering to delivery timelines to ensure consistent and efficient project execution.
Approval: Outline the approval process. Include the stakeholders and documentation needed to approve the go-live.
Onboarding: Detail the steps and resources needed to effectively integrate new users or teams into the Power Platform environment.
Change management: Develop a structured approach to manage changes. Include communication plans and training to reduce disruption.
Handover to support: Ensure a smooth transition to support teams by providing comprehensive documentation and training to maintain ongoing user satisfaction.

Prioritize tasks into horizons

Horizon mapping is a technique used to visualize and prioritize tasks across different time horizons. By mapping tasks into immediate, near-term, and long-term horizons, organizations ensure they address urgent needs while planning for future objectives. This approach helps in balancing short-term demands with long-term strategic goals, ensuring sustained progress and alignment with overall business objectives.

Horizon 1 (immediate): Tasks that need to be completed in the short term, typically within days or weeks. These tasks are urgent and critical for immediate goals.
Horizon 2 (near-term): Tasks that are important but not urgent, planned for the next few months. These tasks support medium-term objectives.
Horizon 3 (long-term): Tasks that are part of long-term planning, often spanning several months to years. These tasks align with strategic goals and future growth.

As you map tasks into horizons, consider dependencies between the initiatives, budget, current and planned projects, and people movements during road mapping.

Example task list

Tasks vary based on the organization’s size and the maturity of Power Platform adoption. However, the following tasks are typically involved in establishing Power Platform governance and nurture processes. This list of tasks isn't exhaustive but serves as a foundational guide to help you begin planning your Power Platform adoption strategy.

Strategy & Plan	Manage	Secure	Monitor	Nurture & Support
Identify an executive sponsor to champion the Power Platform initiative and provide strategic direction	Establish and maintain environment (and supporting Data Loss Prevention) strategy	Configure and enable cross tenant isolation	Regularly review Power Platform analytics for overall platform usage and adoption	Establish an internal champions community
Establish specific, measurable goals for what the organization aims to achieve with Power Platform	Automate process for environment lifecycle operations (create, control, configure, delete)	Regularly review and approve connectors to be added to the DLP strategy	Monitor capacity/consumption by department or organization structure to attribute cost	Develop training and learning resources to onboard makers to standards for app design and development
Define a license assignment strategy, including a model for cross-charging license and capacity costs to business teams (if applicable to your organization). Enable self-service purchase and autoclaim.	Automate key support activities (for example, change app permissions or ownership, quarantine apps)	Define and maintain application lifecycle management processes (for example, pipelines, solution checker, source control)	Configure sharing limits	Create a maker assessment and certification program
Evaluate current processes and identify areas where Power Platform can add value	Establish visibility and control with Managed Environment capabilities	Set up and maintain Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies	Monitor and take action on overshared, unused, or orphaned resources to maintain hygiene	Create a catalog of sample apps, theming, and reusable UI components to promote reuse
Determine the budget, personnel, and technology resources required for successful implementation	Review governance policies at a regular cadence	Restrict environment creation to admins	Monitor performance and reliability using Application Insights	Create a dedicated support team for Power Platform
Involve key stakeholders from various departments to ensure their needs and concerns are addressed	Manage user licenses and capacity / consumption	Disable share to everyone and apply sharing limits to nominated environment	Enable Manged Environment Power Advisor to take recommended actions	Create a feedback system for makers to provide feedback to Power Platform Center of Excellence/Center of Enablement
Outline how information about the Power Platform initiative will be communicated across the organization	Create a strategy for appropriate use of Default and Developer Environments	Protect against data exfiltration	Monitor and enable tenant and environment settings for Copilot Studio	Create a library of assets such as custom connectors, for makers to integrate with business systems in a secure way
Establish a Center of Excellence or Center of Enablement team for Power Platform	Configure source control strategy and integration (Application Lifecycle Management)	Enable advanced security features (IP firewalls, Continuous Access Evaluation, Privileged Identity Management)	Review app usage and failure metrics to ensure reliability	Conduct code and architectural reviews on solutions
Define a process for measuring and communicating business value of your Power Platform adoption	Define and manage app tiers based on business criticality, support needs, and complexity	Assess your current security posture and score and plan security improvements in line with platform enhancements		Provide app production support and maintenance, and potential improvements
Establish an intake process for new solution ideas and automate collection of use case details for review (for example business value, compliance, data sources, integrations)	Create a process for requesting and approving custom environment configurations	Secure high-privilege accounts with Privileged Identity Management (PIM)

Example RACI matrix

After identifying the roles and tasks, organize them into a RACI matrix. The purpose of a RACI matrix is to clarify roles and responsibilities by defining who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for each task.

Start by listing all the tasks and roles involved in your project. List all the tasks in the left-hand column and all the roles across the top row of the matrix.
Assign the appropriate RACI value to each role: a. Responsible (R): The person who performs the task. b. Accountable (A): The person ultimately answerable for the task's completion. c. Consulted (C): People who provide input and feedback. d. Informed (I): People who need to be kept informed of progress and outcomes.
Ensure each task has one accountable person and that responsibilities are clearly distributed.
Share the RACI matrix with the team to ensure everyone understands their roles and responsibilities.

This example illustrates how to create a RACI matrix:

Roles/Tasks	Power Platform product owner	Power Platform admin	Pro-Dev team	Information Security and Compliance	Enterprise architects	Community Lead	IT support	Makers and end users
Configure and enable cross-tenant isolation	A	R		C			I
Establish environment strategy	A	R			C		I	I
Monitor capacity / consumption by department or organization structure	C	A	I	C			R
Develop and maintain training and learning resources	A			C		R		I
Monitor and act on overshared, unused, or orphaned resources	A	R						R
Create standard UI libraries for makers	C		R		I	A		I
Use Application Insights for Power Apps	A	C	R	I	I	A		I
ALM to deploy app from development to test to production environments	C	A	R				I	I
Identify business critical solutions	C	C		C	C		I	A, R
Create and configure security roles	A	R	R	C	C
Establish a DLP strategy	A	R	I	C	I	I	I	I
Create a way for makers to provide feedback to the Power Platform Center of Enablement	I	C				A, R		I

Continuous improvement

Continuously evolve your roles and responsibilities as your organization progresses in its Power Platform adoption journey. This ongoing evaluation helps identify new tasks that emerge as your adoption matures and ensures that existing tasks are still relevant and effectively managed. Change management plays a vital role in this process, providing a structured approach to handle transitions smoothly. By regularly reviewing and updating your RACI matrix, you can adapt to new challenges, streamline workflows, and maintain alignment with your strategic goals.

Next step

Defining a structured delivery and organization model is essential for driving successful Power Platform adoption within your organization. A well-defined model establishes clear roles and responsibilities and fosters collaboration and innovation.

Evaluate delivery models