Strategy and vision
Organizations that implement Power Platform solutions often have power users and their professional developers working hand in hand on projects. The power users are building applications that help to improve job function or enhance productivity, while developers are building the more technical components that make these solutions work.
This process is different than what has been done in the past. When you have this many people collaborating and building solutions, it can lead to different challenges related to security, compliance, performance and more.
Before you start building solutions using the Microsoft Platform, it's important to consider what that looks like. A little planning and consideration can go a long way towards the success of a project. This includes implementing different tools and practices designed to help ensure that the solutions you're building will go more smoothly.
Establish a Center of Excellence
One of the first things that you should consider is establishing a Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence. Establishing Center of Excellence (CoE) means investing in and nurturing the organic growth the Power Platform can provide while maintaining governance and control. For many organizations, the CoE is the first step in fostering greater creativity and innovation across the organization. It empowers different business units to digitize and automate their business processes, while maintaining the necessary level of central oversight and governance.
One key principle is to clarify why you're setting up a CoE, what you aim to accomplish, and the key business outcomes you hope to achieve. Then get started and learn and evolve along the way.
A CoE is designed to drive innovation and improvement. It can break down geographic and organizational silos to bring together like-minded people with similar business goals to share knowledge and success, while at the same time providing standards, consistency, and governance to the organization. In summary, a CoE can be a powerful way for an organization to align around business goals rather than individual department metrics.
Typically, the following people or departments are key drivers or stakeholders when establishing a Center of Excellence:
App and flow makers
Application lifecycle management and DevOps users
Central IT
Support and training engineers
Business change management
At first, establishing a Center of Excellence might start off simple with a single individual using the provided tools and best practices to get a view of their Microsoft Power Platform adoption in their organization. As your organization evolves, it might grow into a more mature investment with multiple functions and roles to manage multiple aspects of governance, training, support, and automated app deployment across the organization.
We recommend the following strategy for getting started with your journey of establishing a CoE:
Secure by establishing data loss prevention policies, managing licenses and access to data sources.
Evangelize by providing a community space on Teams, Yammer or SharePoint, with a collection of links for people to start their learning.
Monitor your usage, see who is creating apps, what apps are being created, and how they're used.
Evolve your CoE strategy with those learnings.
You can learn more about creating Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence here: Get started with Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence.
Roles and responsibilities
Planning and maintain Power Platform solutions as well as establishing a Center of Excellence, typically requires input and feedback for many different stakeholders to be effective. To assist with this, we recommend that you include the following roles and responsibilities as part of your strategy. This will help to provide guidance related to application creation, help ensuring data is secure, and help to ensure that app makers are using best practices as they build solutions. The list below represents a suggested starting point. In your organization, this might be different, or you might start with only a few roles and grow to more as your adoption journey continues.
Low-code strategy team
The low-code strategy team represents the key decision makers and ensures the Microsoft Power Platform strategy is aligned with organizational goals. This team also is responsible for adoption and change management, and for looking at ways of working across the organization. As a driver for digital innovation, they ensure a concrete action plan for increasing digital literacy is in place. Often that is achieved through a combination of bottom-up and top-down initiatives.
Bottom up: Educate your makers, make it less scary, and drive self-enablement.
Top down: Work on executive literacy and creating an innovation-friendly culture.
Microsoft Power Platform admin team
The Microsoft Power Platform admin team is responsible for establishing an environment strategy, setting up data loss prevention (DLP) policies, and managing users, capacity, and licensing. They also make data available to makers through connectors, integration, or migration.
Microsoft Power Platform nurture team
The Microsoft Power Platform nurture team—and this can consist of your champions—organizes app-in-a-day events and hackathons, provides mentorship to makers and ensures new makers get off to a good start, and really look to evangelizing the platform.
Automation and reusable components
Another team or function that you should consider is one that looks at automating tasks, such as archiving unused resources, identifying highly used resources to provide more formal support, and approving environment and license requests from end users. This team would also set up application lifecycle management using the Microsoft Power Platform Build Tools for Azure DevOps, support architecture reviews with makers, and share common templates and reusable components. Having these functions in place will ensure that your organization extracts benefits more quickly, by ensuring processes are consistent and best practices copied across the organization.
Delivery Models
Another consideration that you should think about initially is how you'll be delivering solutions to the organization. Depending on the size of your organization, you might want to formalize your Microsoft Power Platform adoption approach by implementing a structured organization model. You should consider the following ways to structure your team and decide what is the best fit for your situation and organization.
Microsoft Power Platform has four delivery models, but each of these is just a mental model, every organization has a variation of multiple models along this continuum. For example, even if you opt for a centralized model, where all requirements are coming into a central delivery team, you'll still have citizen developers discovering the platform and building apps for their teams. You'll have elements of matrix or BizDevOps regardless.
These models can help you consider what your current software delivery model is and how Microsoft Power Platform might overlay into it, or how your current model might evolve to accommodate the rapid development capability enabled by Microsoft Power Platform.
Centralized
In this model, you create central teams of product owners who own the low-code delivery of departmental solutions from around the organization's business units. Professional developers owning code-first solutions will work in tandem with the business to deliver in a shared model. Enterprise architects will own the middle tier and services, and ensure data is available to makers. Central IT will own the licensing and systems in which everyone operates.
With this model, you create a central team that can pick up development of apps based on organizational priorities. Additionally, because they would have foundational expertise in Power Apps, your team will include members who specialize in specific parts of Microsoft Power Platform such as Power Automate, Power BI, and the Power Apps component framework, or they could specialize in third-party integration and artificial intelligence. This model is an effective way to drive change across your organization and is the best way to deliver any type of application.
Decentralized
In this model, you can create multiple teams across the organization that are close to the day-to-day running of various teams. They'll have resources to deliver apps consistently within organizational guidelines. Each team can run autonomously, and they can split and grow in cellular fashion. However, with this model, you'll still need centralized governance to apply some high-level digital guardrails to ensure corporate compliance. These can include things like data loss prevention (DLP) governance, connector management, and license management to ensure users and developers can safely build and release solutions with minimal intervention from IT, while keeping company data safe and compliant. This is a great self-service option.
Matrix
With this model, you mix the best of decentralized and centralized. You have a centralized team of trained and certified Microsoft Power Platform specialists. You'll have leaders of change, design, delivery, and architecture, in addition to specialized trainers to train local teams across the organization. Local teams made up of citizen developers are connected with experts from the centralized structure, to make sure nothing is getting lost in translation between the people doing their day-to-day jobs and using the apps that are being built. With this model, you can scale into the thousands of people working on app creation.
This team should also consider the notion of a Center of Excellence to manage their data estate and deploy solutions with guidelines for everyone. This works well for self-service and small teams to deliver options quickly with little IT engagement.
BizDevOps
Rapid app development can only happen at the speed that operations such as IT can support the apps created. BizDevOps is a holistic relationship between app makers and operations that works in a virtuous loop. For this to work, all teams need to have a clear vision of the digital culture the organization is moving toward. To get the maximum value from the apps created, they need reliable support, governance, and maintainability. As technology evolves, updates will need to be made on the apps to keep them current. Not only being aware of change, but having a plan for managing it, is a key to successful apps.
Now that we've examined some of the key elements to consider when developing a Power Platform strategy and vision, let’s examine some things to consider when planning a deployment.